


Theories of Magic and Mind

by M_Leigh



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: First War with Voldemort, Hogwarts Era, Lie Low At Lupin's (Harry Potter), M/M, Memory Loss, Misery, Past Child Abuse, Pensieves, Subjectivity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:20:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23189122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Leigh/pseuds/M_Leigh
Summary: “Pensieves are subjective, just like memories are,” Remus continued. “So I can’t just—pull out memories of Hogwarts and play them like films for you to show you exactly what happened. A lot of it is sort of fuzzy and fragmented and it’s not a reliable record of events. But I thought it might be helpful.”Sirius considered the fact that circumspect, reserved Remus Lupin was offering to crack open his mind and let Sirius inside. “All right then.”Memory magic, across three eras.
Relationships: Sirius Black & Lily Evans Potter, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 58
Kudos: 290





	Theories of Magic and Mind

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written any fic in a while, but [GESTURES AT EVERYTHING]. So here we are.
> 
> I made some tweaks to the way that certain things, Pensieves especially, are presented in the novels, to suit my own ends. Even as a teen I remember thinking, "But that doesn't make any _sense_!" which is of course silly. But it was a way to explore some things I'm interested in here.
> 
> Given that this entire story is about memory, it will not surprise you to hear that there are some depictions of child abuse herein. Other than that, I don't think this requires any other warnings. Everybody is very miserable but that is to be expected.
> 
> Enjoy!

**1.**

Advanced Magical Theory was held in a windowless tower room three days a week, and taught by a stooped old deaf wizard called Professor Martinson, whom Sirius was quite sure still did not know his name six months into the year. He had never heard of or even seen Professor Martinson before their first mind-numbing class session; apparently, he commuted from Oxford. It was a great honour, Dumbledore had told them all mildly at the beginning of the year, to be taught by such a distinguished scholar, but Sirius thought that Professor Martinson, with his unbearably nasal accent (“You sound posh,” Evans told him, “but he sounds like he’s about to start going on about personally colonising _Keen_ ya”), and his inability to look up from his notes as he lectured, was not a tremendously compelling argument in favour of scholarship, Oxford, or old age generally.

Sirius and James had not been thrilled to learn that Advanced Magical Theory was a strongly recommended prerequisite for those who wished to apply for the Auror training programme. “But being an Auror is just about the most practical thing you can _do_ ,” Sirius had complained to McGonagall, when she had delivered the bad news at the end of fifth year. She had sighed—the special, particularly aggrieved sigh she reserved for him and James—and told him that if he hoped to solve magical crimes after the fact it might be useful if he actually understood the concepts behind magic processes. “As being an Auror,” she explained very deliberately, “does not merely consist of running around shouting _Stupefy_ at criminals. As I am sure you are aware.”

Sirius had shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

That explained six of the eight people in the class; Remus, of course, was taking it as a preface to graduate study, and Evans was there for reasons Sirius couldn’t fully explain. (Peter, during course selection, had told them they were all mad, and signed up for Advanced Herbology instead.) Evans and Remus were the only people in the class who actually paid attention, and asked questions, and as a result Martinson actually knew who they were. Sirius supposed she had her reasons. “I think,” Remus told him dryly when they discussed this, “that Lily is simply interested in how magic works. For the sake of intellectual inquiry.”

“God,” Sirius said, “how awful.”

Six months into the experience, Sirius still felt it was a bit of a scam; even the course name was misleading. How could you be taking Advanced Magical Theory if you hadn’t taken Magical Theory in the first place? According to Remus, this was supposed to impress universities, which Sirius found ridiculous given that they could see all the other courses on their transcripts, and would thus surely notice the absence of Magical Theory; Remus told him he was giving university admission committees too much credit.

He had never given much thought to how magic worked, which Evans told him was a sign of his cloistered pure-blood upbringing. But, well, magic just _was_ , and always had been; he could feel it instinctively. He had started performing magic without a wand, his parents had told him, when he was two. He and James and Remus and Peter had all been experimenting with wandless magic recently and while Peter could barely cast _Lumos_ and James and Remus sweated through more difficult spells, Sirius waved idly and silenced the room, drew music from who knew where, pulled flowers from the walls, made it snow indoors. James was dead jealous and had complained about it after for days, petulantly—why couldn’t _he_ do the same, he was from an old family, too, why did _Sirius_ have all the luck—until Remus told him he sounded like Snape. “I do _not_ ,” he muttered, but stopped talking.

So Advanced Magical Theory seemed largely a waste of time, except for the occasional days when they got to, as Professor Martinson liked to say, “put _theory_ into _practise_.” One day in February, after two weeks’ worth of interminable lectures about The Theory of Magic and Mind, they walked into class to see two stone bowls displayed on a table at the front of the room. “Today,” Martinson droned, “we will be putting _theory_ into _practise_ by exploring the nature of memory transference vis-à-vis Pensieves.”

“Blimey,” said James. Sirius craned forward to look. He’d never seen one before, not even at home; they were exceedingly rare. He wondered how Martinson had managed to get his hands on two. The benevolence of the Oxford Institute for Magical Research and Practice, he supposed. Rumour had it they had a stuffed Chinese fireball in the basement, and phoenix specimens going back to the 1100s. One day, Remus would work there, and start wearing little round spectacles and take to smoking a pipe, and pioneer the study of some heretofore unknown creature or invent some entirely new category of spell. He was already hunched over his parchment, taking notes, and Martinson had barely started speaking.

Martinson droned on for a while about the history of Pensieves (first known use: Norway, court of Harald Hardrada, 1061; popularisation in Britain: briefly under James II, more significantly beginning in the 1790s, most notably by William Wordsworth, “that most nostalgic of all English poets [Sirius made a jerk-off motion under the desk and Lily trod on his foot], who ‘liberated’ a neglected Pensieve from a basement at St John’s College while a student at Cambridge and subsequently made extensive use of the device, sharing it also with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who experimented with it while under the influence of opium [“Which,” Martinson said, looking up from his notes for once, “I would _not_ recommend”]); Victorian advances in Magical Theories of Mind; and the dangers of spending too much time in one’s own memories (Terrence W. Lilliput, 1892, driven mad at age twenty-eight after spending most of 1891 in a Pensieve after the death of his fiancée Mary Whitestone). And then, finally, he started to explain the practical portion of “ _theory_ and _practise_.”

“You will work in pairs,” he began, “taking turns to explore a recent memory of your choosing. We only have two Pensieves here today so the other groups will begin composing essays on Victorian experiments in magical memory practise. You will, of course, remain in your assigned pairs,” he began, and Sirius tried not to snicker when James turned to gaze balefully at Evans, who had been paired with Sirius for the entirety of the year. In years past, he thought she might have complained, but in a class of eight, the possibility of James as an alternative loomed so large that she seemed content to suffer through Sirius’ “raging narcissism and myopia.”

Anyway, he’d decided he quite liked Evans, and to his own great surprise and James’ enduring agony the feeling seemed to be mutual. He suspected her change of sentiment had something to do with his efforts to behave more responsibly after The Incident—which even McGonagall had noticed and clearly found suspicious—and their mutual obsession with the news. Most of the rest of the student body seemed blithely unconcerned with the slow trickle of stories about Muggles and Muggle-born wizards and witches dying under mysterious circumstances, which had begun over the past summer; even James had told Sirius he ought to relax. (Remus had frowned, and said nothing.) There were other things happening, too, that Sirius found worrisome: silver-tongued ex-Slytherin politicians dropping hints about Tradition and incendiary, often incoherent op-eds appearing in the _Daily Prophet_ about the dilution of wizarding blood (“INTERMARRIAGE: SHOULD IT BE BANNED?”) and the dangers of becoming involved in Muggle politics (“WILL MUGGLE-BORNS EXPOSE WIZARDKIND TO EASE COLD WAR TENSIONS?”) and et cetera, et cetera (“I’M A HALF-BLOOD, AND I KNOW THAT ‘MUDBLOOD’ ISN’T A SLUR”; “HOGWARTS NOW ACCEPTS MORE MUGGLE-BORN THAN PURE-BLOOD STUDENTS: HAVE WE GONE TOO FAR?”; “WEREWOLVES ARE RUNNING WILD IN CORNWALL: WHEN WILL THE MINISTRY STEP IN TO PUT THEM DOWN?”).

But Evans was bull-headed and had started getting Muggle papers from all over the country delivered to her by post in the morning, a measure that most other students at the school clearly thought mad and Sirius thought brilliant. He’d told her so one morning in November after breakfast, and her face had gone from defensive to surprised to maybe a little bit bashful. (He’d told Remus about this later and Remus, who was still acting even more quiet and reserved around him than usual, had smiled as if reacting to some private amusement, and said, “You _do_ know that girls find you quite charming.” Sirius had burst out laughing.) He had wound up carrying half the pile of newspapers Evans had crammed under her chin back up to the tower and then gone with her to the library that afternoon, where she gave him half the stack to comb through, in search of suspicious events.

“There’s an old fellow outside Manchester who died of a gas leak,” Sirius told her. “But I reckon it really was a gas leak. It took four days for anyone to notice and his four cats were dead, too. _Four_ cats. May Tibby, Dotty, Bessie, and Minnie rest in peace.”

“Were those really their names?”

“No idea,” Sirius said, flipping the page, “but maybe I’m clairvoyant.”

She snorted, unimpressed. “Maybe we’re both clairvoyant,” she said after a pause, staring intently at her paper. “Seeing as everybody else is more worried about bloody Quidditch than—well. What are you so bothered about, anyway? You’re as pure-blooded as they come. And not exactly, excuse me for saying so, historically the most altruistic person I’ve ever met.”

“You wound me, Evans,” he said, and then paused, still staring fixedly down at a headline about football to avoid having to look up and see her expression. “I grew up with all these people, don’t forget. So—I have a good idea of what’s coming.” He could still feel the pavement under his back when they’d cast him out, the ringing in his ears from the spell that sent him flying out the door. He’d hit his head and it had started bleeding. A woman walking a little white dog had stopped to ask if he was all right. The dog had sniffed him all over—dogs always, somehow, knew—and he’d told her he was fine, thanks very much. He thought she thought he was, maybe, a junkie. But the dog had liked him. He hadn’t been able to take anything out of the house except his wand, which was up his sleeve; he owned nothing now but his leather jacket, his boots, his wand. The shirt on his back. His school things: gone. His books: gone. The photos of the four of them tacked to the wall by his bed: gone. The one photo of him and Remus, taken before The Incident, on the Hogwarts lawn: he had his arm around Remus’ shoulders and was saying something ridiculous to the camera to make him laugh, and Remus was laughing and ducking his head.

Martinson demonstrated how to take a memory out of your head, which Sirius had to admit looked trippy in the extreme: somehow light and solid at the same time, molten silver and air. He and Lily were up first, along with Kingsley Shacklebolt and Wilma Feinhardt from Ravenclaw, and as he and Lily stared down at the bowl he felt James glaring at him from across the room. He turned and waggled his eyebrows, because even if he _was_ trying to be good there was only so much a man could take, and the temptation to watch James Potter turn that shade of red was more than he could resist. Remus rolled his eyes and turned back to his parchment.

“I don’t see how this works,” Evans said, quite definitively.

“How do you mean?” Sirius said. “Seems pretty straightforward.”

She huffed and looked at him pityingly; he knew this look, it was her “I cannot believe you have never thought about what I am about to say, you hopeless pure-blood” look. “Well,” she said, “memory just doesn’t _work_ like this. The way he described, I mean. It’s not objective, and we lose loads as we get older. I couldn’t pull something out from when I was five or even ten years old and expect it to be a reliable factual record of events. I don’t have enough information. I can’t even remember everything I said in conversation two _days_ ago; it’s just not how our brains work.”

“You and your Muggle science,” he said.

“Ha, ha. I mean it, if this were so reliable, why wouldn’t they use it in court proceedings? I’ve never heard of them using a Pensieve to collect evidence, and they use veritaserum all the time, so it’s not as though they won’t interfere if they—”

“Yes, yes, all right,” he interrupted. “I think the best way to examine this theory of yours is to _apply_ it _practically_.”

“Oh, Sirius,” she said, “Professor Martinson would be ever so proud, shall we call him over here to show him what you’ve learned.”

“We should use a recent memory,” he continued, ignoring her, “and an older one, to see the difference. You pick something from, I don’t know, a week ago, and I’ll pick something from when I was little.” All his memories of childhood were, to put it mildly, awful, but it seemed rude to ask her to volunteer to offer up one of her own. Anyway she would probably be fascinated by the sight of the ancestral Black family home, which had not been updated for the twentieth or possibly even the nineteenth century.

Evans frowned, and after thinking for a minute put her wand to her temple, muttered, and pulled it and a gently moving strand of silver light away from her head, which she deposited in the bowl. “Well,” she said. “In we go, I suppose.”

And in they went.

They were standing in the corridor by McGonagall’s office. Everything looked normal, Sirius thought—except that it didn’t. He couldn’t say, precisely, what was wrong; everything was just slightly off. He frowned.

“This is strange,” he said.

“Oh my goodness,” said Evans, and he turned in time to see Evans stare at another Evans walking down the hall, looking unhappy about something.

“Oh, this is very weird,” she said, “I don’t think I like this at all. Is that _really_ what I look like from behind,” she added somewhat desperately, as the other Evans turned and knocked on McGonagall’s office door.

Sirius blinked, and then frowned. “No,” he said. “Not quite.” Everything about the other Evans wasn’t quite right—she was—she was just—

“Oh,” he said, and then had to try hard not to laugh. Girls were so predictable. “Actually you’re prettier than that. And slightly skinnier.”

“Sirius Black,” Evans said in a low tone of voice, “I swear to god—”

“I’m making an objective observation!” he cried, raising his hands. “For our experiment! In the name of science! Don’t worry, I’m not coming onto you in your own memory, how perverse would that be. I’m not coming onto you _anywhere_. You’re, you know, you’re cracking, Evans, but”—he turned to gaze at her intensely, one hand on his heart—“what we have transcends the physical.”

“You are so annoying,” she said, as McGonagall opened the door.

“Ah, good evening, Miss Evans,” she said, and all three of them slid inside.

Sirius had been in McGonagall’s office many, many times, and he knew immediately that it was Not Right, either. McGonagall was wrong, too. She was offering Evans a biscuit and saying something about the weather. This was not consistent with Sirius’ experience, but that was probably just because McGonagall actually liked Evans, and wasn’t about to threaten to expel her. No, it was something else, just a general sense of—of—warmth.

“Oh,” he said, realising, “you _like_ coming here.”

Evans looked at him sideways. “Well, yes, Black,” she said, “normally when I stop in to see McGonagall it’s not because I’ve nearly been expelled.”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, “that’s not—there’s a, a _tone_ to the memory, do you see—a _feeling_ , it feels like how you felt. It’s subjective.” He pointed at McGonagall, who was smiling warmly at the other version of Evans now. “McGonagall,” he said, “has _never_ smiled at anybody like that, I don’t care if she actually likes you, I don’t care if you’re the best student she’s ever had, her face does not make that expression.”

Evans was frowning intently. “Be quite a moment,” she said, “and let me listen to the conversation.”

They were talking about the murders. The “mysterious deaths,” rather. Evans was asking about what the school’s plan was, what precautions would be taken. “Sirius Black and I have been reading the Muggle newspapers,” she continued—McGonagall’s eyebrows shot all the way to her forehead—“and, Professor, it’s _very_ worrying. People can’t just keep ignoring what’s happening—it’s only going to get worse—”

“I know, Miss Evans,” McGonagall said. “I assure you, precautions are in place.”

“But what _are_ they?”

McGonagall looked at her kindly. “I’m afraid to say that I can’t share all of these things with you. You are still very young, and it is our job to protect you. And…”

Something funny happened. A sort of blur, a slip, a haze: and then Evans was saying, “But it’s going to be affecting us, and we _should_ be involved. How long will it be until someone’s family gets killed? Or a student?”

“What just happened,” Sirius said.

“Miss Evans,” McGonagall said, “as soon as you have graduated—you will be the first to be informed about—actions—” More haziness. Then everything was sharp again, sharper, even. “We will need you,” McGonagall said very intensely. “Study well. Learn all you can. Prepare yourself for what is ahead.”

“I was very angry,” Evans told him as she watched herself get up and walk out the door. The last bit of conversation had been fuzzy and inaudible. They followed her into the hallway. “When she told me she wouldn’t, well, tell me. I was really furious. This was only two days ago.”

“Did you notice that everything sort of changed when she said—at the end—” He felt awkward repeating it. It felt too intense, too personal.

“Yes,” said Evans thoughtfully. “I was still angry but I felt important, when she said that. I thought—all right, fuck you, I’ll be the best at everything until then, and then I’ll—oh, it’s so stupid and arrogant.”

“Look who you’re talking to,” Sirius reminded her.

“Well, I thought, I’ll learn everything, and then I’ll stop this, and then sort of stopped paying attention. Oh, this is all awfully intimate, isn’t it?” She was worrying the ends of her hair. “I sort of think it shouldn’t be allowed.”

“Sorry,” he said. “At least I’m not James.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said, “though I am also very grateful for that, I promise you. In that case I’d just have picked breakfast. Or an old History of Magic lecture.”

“Cruel woman,” Sirius said admiringly. “So, to sum up: the bits you can’t remember as well sort of—fade. Yeah? And your feelings about things change the way the memory looks and feels as well.”

“Yes,” she said, “it would appear so.”

“Brilliant,” said Sirius. “My turn. This might be a bit rough, fair play and all that.”

Immediately upon entering the memory he could tell that it was different. The air was clammy and cold and dread was pricking at his spine. Well, he began to think, he wouldn’t need Evans to—and then he opened his eyes.

“Whoa,” said Evans.

“I don’t think that covers it,” Sirius replied, looking around the entrance hall of Number 12, Grimmauld Place, which was—enormous. He reached up to reach the banister and had to raise himself on his toes. The portraits on the walls loomed above them, the door behind was impossibly tall. Everything was slightly imprecise, as though someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens of a camera and then deposited them in the frame.

“This is your _house_?” Evans asked.

“Was,” he said. “There I am, little pure-blood princeling. Having a grand time of it, as you can see.”

He was sitting on the stairs half a flight up, resting his chin in his hands, looking miserable. Sirius Black, six years old, wearing a little velvet robe and shining leather shoes. He kicked one heel against the stair below him—waiting, Sirius knew, for the fight downstairs to resolve. He was the same size as they were—a giant child, baby-faced, wretched.

“ _That’s_ ,” Evans started, and was interrupted by a crash coming from the back of the house, and the sounds of his mother shrieking something unintelligible. He didn’t know whether he’d been able to hear it at the time and had forgotten or whether it had been like this then: incomprehensible noise conveying nothing but misery and terror. In fact he wasn’t sure when this was, precisely. Certain things in his childhood stood out vividly but most of it fell under the umbrella of a sort of generalised torment. He looked back up at his smaller self, and saw that he had laid down sideways on the step, hands curled under his head.

“Do you know,” he said to Evans, who looked horrified—perhaps he should have warned her more thoroughly—“I actually don’t recall at all what they were fighting about, I wonder whether it’ll come back, or if it does, whether it’s really reliable—”

“—with that _Mudblood cunt_ —”

“Ah yes,” said Sirius. He heard her say something else about _that woman_ and _filthy_ and possibly even _animal_ ; he couldn’t quite be sure.

“How old were you?” Evans asked.

“Six,” Sirius said. “I think that was the year Dad started shagging some Muggle woman—I’ve no idea where he might have met her, because he didn’t—doesn’t—work, and socialises exclusively with other stuck-up old pure-blood bastards. But, you know, men will be men, and all that. My mum screamed about it for about five years. He’d set up a flat for her and everything, it was all a dreadful cliché. Mid-life crisis, et cetera.”

“Do you mean Muggle, or Muggle-born?” Evans asked. “I don’t know why I’m asking you this.”

“Do you know, I have no idea,” Sirius said, as something crashed in the background and his younger self covered his ears with his hands. “I think my mother hexed her into premature dementia, if family lore is to be believed, though she stopped short of outright murder.”

“—he’ll never behave if you don’t start—”

“I don’t think that would have been the same conversation,” he said, “so I suppose that answers the question of reliability.”

“—hateful little boy, just like—”

“Yes,” said Sirius, “this would be the greatest hits.”

“Sirius?” someone asked. Sirius swallowed. Regulus was standing at the top of the stairs, clutching one of the balusters. (Regulus didn’t speak to him anymore.) The other Sirius took his hands off his ears and crawled the couple of steps up to the top.

“It’s fine,” he said, sounding much older than six. “They’re just arguing.”

Regulus chewed his lip and sat down next to him. Neither of them said anything for a long moment, just listened to the inchoate shouting, and then Sirius opened his hand and a little bird hopped out, onto Regulus’ shoulder.

Regulus cackled with laughter as the bird picked at his black hair. “Do another one,” he said, and Sirius thought for a moment, opened his hand, and a frog hopped out and onto Regulus’ lap, croaking deeply. He put his chin in his hands again and watched as Regulus laughed, and poked the frog and watched the bird fly around his head and chirp.

“Regulus was always with his nanny,” Sirius said. He was starting to feel frayed; the memory seemed almost to be shaking. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

All of the sudden his mother burst out of the doorway. She was a giant, a terror; he and Evans both cowered back against the wall, Sirius throwing one arm across her chest. “ _You_ ,” she said, and pointed up at him, and he was jerked, stumbling, down the stairs. “Don’t think I don’t see you,” she hissed. “You’re just like your father. A lying, cheating little—” Regulus and the little creatures had vanished, Sirius noticed. That was interesting. His mother hand her fist in his hair, she was dragging him across the floor, shrieking curses to pull his feet up off the ground and—

They were suddenly back in the classroom, flat on their backs on the floor.

“Did you do that?” he asked Evans, who was white as a sheet, and clutching his hand.

“No,” she said.

“Well,” he mumbled, “add that to the list. Awfully sorry about the childhood trauma, and all that. I didn’t remember that last bit. Just—the stairs—and—” He was, he realised distantly, shaking.

Evans sat up slowly, still clutching his hand. Shacklebolt and Feinhardt were still in the Pensieve, Martinson was paying them no mind whatsoever, and the other four students were staring at them and not even pretending to be subtle about it. James had a vein twitching in his forehead. Fuck James, Sirius thought distantly, and looked instead at Remus, who had gone quite pale, and was staring at him with wide eyes. Sirius was suddenly overcome with the totality of his misery, with the knowledge of how badly he had fucked everything up, with the desperation to put his head on Remus’ lap and beg for forgiveness and be forgiven. Everything was impossible. He could feel his mother’s hand in his hair as she dragged him across the floor. He was breathing through his mouth. _Oh, dear_ , he thought, and clutched harder at Evans’ hand.

Evans managed to pull him up and they sat slumped together against the desk. She clutched his shaking hand in both of hers in her lap.

“Well,” she said faintly, “I think I begin to understand your motivations.”

“Cheers,” he said fuzzily, and closed his eyes.

•••

Sirius brought the Pensieve over to their table after he and Lily had recovered sufficiently from whatever it was they had gotten up to; he still looked a bit shaken but had recovered himself enough to attempt a very poor imitation of his usual winning, slightly nefarious smile. “Here you are, lads,” he said, “enjoy.”

“What did you _do_ ,” James hissed. Lily was sitting across the room with her head in her hands.

“Why _Mr_ Potter,” Sirius huffed, “a lady never kisses and tells,” and then swanned—staggered, rather—back across the room to sit down next to Lily and leaning in close to say something to her. James twitched.

“James,” Remus said wearily, “you have simply got to stop.”

“It’s just—I—how does he _always do this_ ,” James said. “How does he get _all girls_ to like him. Even _Evans_. Evans _hates_ him.”

“I think Evans mainly hates you,” Remus said, “and if you considered things rationally, you might realise that Lily coming round to Sirius considerably increases your chances of convincing her you aren’t wholly intolerable.”

“Not if he gets there first!”

“James,” Remus said, still staring at Sirius, who was white as a sheet and had sweated through his shirt, “I am trying very hard not to lose my temper.”

“Fine,” James muttered, “let’s get on with this then.”

They first wandered about one of James’ memories of Christmas, which involved a pile of presents, Sirius running around in the snow outside the Potters’ house as Padfoot, and a great deal of pudding. Remus was jealous, though he didn’t say so: the Potters’ house was large and warm and inviting, their Christmas tree enormous and hung with delicate magical ornaments, their dinner a feast. It wasn’t fair of him to think these things: his mother had made a very nice roast at Christmas and bought a Christmas pudding from the store that had been perfectly decent. His father, with whom he did not particularly get on, had given him a battered copy of a hard-to-find book of defence spells he had been wanting, and a manful little pat on the shoulder. His mother had given him a scarf she’d knitted herself, five bars of nice chocolate, and a box of her own musty paperbacks from up in the attic. They smelled slightly mothy and were already beginning to fall apart at the seams but she had Penguin Classics of all the grand old English classics and copies of du Maurier novels with garish pulpy covers. There were even a couple of pulp romance books tucked in the bottom of the box, “which I thought would give you a bit of a laugh.” It wasn’t fair to want anything else. But, of course, he couldn’t help it.

“That’s wicked,” James said when they came up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, having seemingly forgotten his distress over Sirius Black associating with Lily Evans. That was the thing about James: he never managed to hold onto negative feelings for long; they just seeped out of him and vanished. “Properly _wicked_. Okay, okay, let’s see yours.”

Remus picked a day at the end of fourth year when they had all been out on the lawn by the lake—he didn’t know if this counted as “recent” but he was curious to see if it was different if you chose something from farther back. The sun was bright—had it ever been this bright?—and he had to blink a few times before he saw them all lolling about on the grass. James was enthusiastically explaining something to Peter, who was listening dutifully—poor Peter, Remus thought, who had the patience and dedication of a saint—while Sirius did the same to Remus—except it wasn’t the same at all, because Remus was leaning back on his elbows and looking up at him with this expression—this expression of, of—

“Oi,” said James from behind him. “Remus? Moony? What’s happening?”

Remus turned away from the embarrassing sight of himself to look at James, who was standing some distance behind him. He had his hands stretched out in front of him and his eyes were moving fuzzily around as though he couldn’t see anything.

“James,” said Remus slowly, “can you see where we are?”

“Can _you_?” James asked. “I just see a load of fog. And I can’t hear anything, either. Have you taken us to the Isle of Mann, or what. Is the Isle of Mann foggy? I’ve never been.”

“I have no idea,” Remus said, “I imagine so,” and turned back to the scene in front of him. He was looking up at Sirius with an expression of—well, there was no point pretending otherwise, of such love that it was excruciating to witness it now, even years later, even in private. Surely, he thought, _surely_ he had never been so obvious. Surely he had never laughed so eagerly at Sirius’ jokes, had never leaned toward him like that—fifteen and clueless, stupid, hormonal—had never lain back with his hands behind his head while Sirius leaned in and whispered something in his ear that made him wheeze with laughter. Sirius did not act like that around him anymore.

He stepped closer. James was shouting, irritated, behind him, but he ignored him. He could not, he realised, hear anything they were saying: it was all just word-shaped sounds. What did he remember about this day? Not any of the details but—the golden light, the breeze from the lake, the glowing warmth of Sirius next to him, of Sirius training his endless wit and charm on him, of making Sirius laugh, which had at that time been his chief aim in life. It was a bit like looking at a photograph, he thought, except that he was inside of it, feeling the sun, and the breeze, and blushing to look at himself.

“Hold on a minute, James,” he said, “I’ll be finished in a second.” He just wanted—he just wanted to see—a little more—

Then Sirius changed into Padfoot, and Remus sat up to scratch his neck, laughing as Padfoot pressed his face against Remus’ own and licked him cheerfully from chin to forehead. That hadn’t ever happened—Sirius could hardly change in the middle of the Hogwarts lawn in broad daylight. But here he was, prancing around Remus while Remus laughed, nosing at his armpit, dashing away and coming back until Remus got up and ran after him and Padfoot barked happily. Once, just after they had shown him what they had done, he and Sirius had gone out into the Forbidden Forest in the middle of the day and Sirius had run around as Padfoot in the autumn sunlight—but that was a different memory, grafted somehow onto this one.

“ _Remus_ ,” said James, sounding definitely alarmed now, “I can’t see you, what’s going on, this is really—”

“It’s all right,” Remus said, “we can go back.”

James looked clammy and unnerved when Remus opened his eyes and looked at him back in the classroom. “That’s not supposed to happen,” he said. “Right? That’s not supposed to happen.”

“I don’t think so, no,” Remus said. James shuddered, and wiped sweat off his face. Sirius and Lily were still deep in what looked like a serious discussion. He wondered what they had seen, and then tried to stop wondering.

At the end of the class he lingered and asked Professor Martinson whether he might be able to do some extra work with the Pensieve outside class. “Yes, yes, I don’t see why not,” Martinson said loudly, “we have them on loan for the next week. But it’s a dangerous business you know—even for a wizard of your ability—”

“Er, yes,” Remus said, embarrassed, and then, when Martinson blinked, continued more loudly, “ _yes_ , right, well, I’ll bring Sirius with me, I know he’s—ah—very curious as well.”

Martinson waved his hand vaguely. Remus was quite certain he had no idea who “Sirius” was, and probably thought he was James. He wasn’t sure why he had said Sirius’ name at all. “Very well,” Martinson said, “I look forward to your report on your findings.”

Remus could use the Pensieve, he told him, later that evening, when it would be locked in the classroom; he gave him the password to get in (“Albatross”). And so Remus spent the rest of the day distracted and thinking about the problem of memory. Professor Martinson hadn’t said that the Pensieve could produce extraneous information—it wasn’t possible go into the next room and see what someone other than the person who had created the memory was doing, for instance—but it seemed to Remus to be clearly a more subjective experience than he had suggested, and then there were the additional problems of a) him conflating two memories into one, and b) James not being able to see anything in his memory at all, which James had helpfully lied about without having been asked.

What Remus really wanted to know was what happened in the dark, rubbed-out places in his memory that he couldn’t ever properly remember: the wolf nights. The night he had been bitten, which his mind had slid around and stuffed somewhere inaccessible. (It had hurt—that was the only thing he remembered. It had hurt so much.) Now on full moon nights he remembered the very beginnings of the change—the crunching bones, the stretching skin, the panic as his mind collapsed into something other, something else—and the opposite process, his body’s reassemblage of itself and the slow recollection of his own subjectivity. Everything else in-between was just a darkness, a hazy sense of dread and pain, which ever since the others had pulled off their astonishing trick had become slightly less awful. (But then Sirius had gone and mucked it up and—)

But they remembered everything, would joke about what had happened in the forest, laugh about things Remus had done. Sirius had some entirely other kind of relationship with him as Padfoot that he could not access at all, and sometimes he thought Sirius would have preferred the canine version of himself on difficult days; before The Incident Sirius had sometimes climbed into Remus’ bed, pulled the curtains closed, and burrowed up close to him in his dog body, looking for some comfort Remus wasn’t sure how to provide. Of course he scratched and stroked him and muttered nonsense in his ear, and Sirius smiled his lolling dog smile up at him, but there was something else that Sirius wanted that Remus didn’t understand, probably couldn’t understand unless he were like that, too—some hunger, he thought, for family-love, for mother-love, for something that would fill up the desperate need for affection that got larger every time he came back from summer vac.

The new Sirius was different: he was quieter, and more studious, and did things like befriend Lily Evans and obsess over the ominous spate of Muggle killings spreading across the country. Over the summer, in the series of stiff letters they had exchanged, he had written one manic letter to Remus to tell him that he had been disowned (though he did not explain why), he had no possessions to his name except his wand and his jacket, it was actually thrilling, very zen or something, Buddhist?, whatever, he was a new man, a new disowned man, an ex-member of the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black, which was kind of like being an ex-convict or maybe an ex-prisoner-of-war, had he ever had a Curly Wurly, James and he had biked down to the Muggle store near his parents’ house and bought a selection of sweets and let me tell you Moony it is ripping, how was your moon this month, I stayed up all night staring at it moving across the sky and thinking of you locked up in your basement or whatever and then the next day practically drowned in the lake, I’ve just realised all your letters are in my desk at home, also all the photographs which I knew about already, and the Valentines we made for Filch in third year do you remember, I think that was my favourite detention so far even if it did involve ammonia, Remus I hope your moon was all right, I stayed up all night watching it and cried thinking about what I did last year and I know you said to stop apologising but I know you’re still mad because I just know I can tell I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry Remus I’m going to send this off before I start crying again.

The next day another letter came that said, Sorry about that last letter I was outrageously high when I wrote it as you may have surmised, James got acid from the girl at the Muggle shop and we both had bad trips, but I just cried a lot and he had paranoid visions of himself turning into a parsnip. Please see attached drawing for my rendering of the same.

What he really wanted was to see Sirius’ memories of what a full moon night looked and felt like, but that would require him to ask, and he wasn’t going to do that. So he would see what his own mind had to tell him.

The memory, when he pulled it out of his mind, looked exactly the same as all the others had: silvery, solid-but-not-solid light. He watched it roll around the bottom of the bowl for a while, sighed, and then touched his finger to it—leaned farther in—and farther—and—

He was in the Shrieking Shack, shivering, naked. It was cold: January. Just waiting for it to arrive. He tried not to look at himself huddled there in the corner, instead looked at the battered floors, the scuffed walls, the rotting bedframe. It was all excruciatingly detailed. He focused so much on all of this, in the moments before it happened. Always the same stupid hope: just hold onto that, onto what you can see, onto your brain—

He turned around when he heard himself start to yell. It was frightening to watch from the outside. His spine contorted; his legs snapped. He was, he realised distantly, breathing quite heavily as he watched himself. His jaw creaked forward. He had a blinding headache. And then—

Roaring darkness, terror, fear, there you are, wind through his fur, hunger, desire, fury, darkness, darkness, dark—

He collapsed against the table behind him and slid to the ground, shaking. Across the room, Sirius was sitting on top of a desk, wearing Muggle clothes, swinging his legs and humming something tunelessly.

“What,” Remus croaked, “are you doing here?”

“I distinctly heard you tell Professor I-Am-a-Fellow-at-an-Important-Research-Institute earlier that you were bringing me along to practise whatever it is that you’re practising, presumably to keep you from keeling over and dying at the tender age of seventeen—which, I must tell you, seems like more of a risk than I had initially anticipated.”

“Fuck off,” Remus managed. He didn’t try to get up because he didn’t think his legs would move.

“Language, Mr Lupin,” said Sirius. “Ten points from Gryffindor from this shocking lapse from a _prefect_.”

Remus tilted his head back and closed his eyes. He felt quite nauseous but he was not about to throw up in front of Sirius. Instead he breathed slowly and tried to think about anything except—that—and found himself thinking of the golden afternoon by the lake, which wasn’t much better.

“What did you do, Moony?”

“Nothing,” muttered Remus. “What had you and Lily so worked up earlier?”

“Only my childhood traumas,” Sirius said lightly. “Did you know, if you pick a memory from when you’re really little, you remember everything at scale? My mum looked like a giant, and she’s bad enough at her regular size.”

“Why on earth,” asked Remus, whose eyes were still closed, “would you pick one of _those_ memories to wander about in?”

“We were experimenting,” said Sirius, “with subjectivity. Turns out Professor Whatsits was quite misleading today, unless the whole point was to see who caught on.”

Remus opened his eyes and frowned. “Hang on,” he said, as his brain caught up to the conversation. “You went into some—awful childhood memory with Lily and she saw everything?”

“Well, yes, Moony, that was sort of the whole idea.”

“Oh.”

Sirius narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

“James couldn’t see anything in mine,” Remus said. It felt like a confession. “Just—white clouds. He could hear me but not anything else. I think he found it quite stressful.”

“What was your memory, then?”

“Just a day by the lake,” Remus said evasively. “Nothing exciting happened.”

“Uh huh,” said Sirius sceptically. “But it was all right with James’?”

“Yes, we relived your Christmas and he thought it was, and I quote, ‘wicked.’”

Sirius snorted. “God love James but he has the emotional depth of a toddler, no wonder Evans can’t stand him. We should tell him he ought to work on being miserable more often, and she might change her tune.”

“You’re the Lily Evans expert now,” Remus said. He attempted to raise one eyebrow, wryly, and thought he did not quite succeed. “You can give him pointers.”

“Over my dead bloody body,” said Sirius. “You know, she’s actually all right, Evans. He can do his dirty work himself.”

Neither of them said anything for a moment. “You still haven’t told me what stupid idea you’ve cooked up down here,” Sirius said eventually. He was looking at him intently in a way Remus did and did not like, very much, all at once.

“It’s nothing,” Remus muttered, “really. I just wondered—well—I thought maybe—it doesn’t matter.”

“Stop vamping,” Sirius told him, “and spit it out.”

“Fine,” Remus snapped, in spite of himself, “I didn’t even think it would work—because the one from earlier was all fuzzy and inexact—but I was just trying to—”

“Dear god would you just—”

“I can never remember moon nights,” Remus finished. His hands had made fists in his trousers. “I can sort of remember the beginning and the end but never anything in the middle, it’s just this—I don’t know, this dark blur, and—well, I just wondered,” he finished, feeling pathetic. He glanced up at Sirius and then looked quickly away again; Sirius looked so generous and kind and Remus didn’t want any of it, he didn’t want it, he couldn’t trust him, it wasn’t fair.

“I suppose dog memories are probably a bit funny, too,” Sirius said, “but we can give it a go if you’d like.”

“Sure,” Remus said angrily, staring at his legs. “Sure, let’s, fine, whatever.”

They arrived in the tunnel below the Shack. Sirius was pacing nervously, chewing on a nail, and James was trying to tell him to calm down and also having a meaningless argument with Peter about, of all things, soda bread.

“Soda bread?” Remus asked Sirius, mystified.

“Yes,” said Sirius, “I assure you that is exactly what they were talking about. Some things linger in the memory.”

From upstairs there was a thud, and then a human scream. Remus froze. The other version of himself screamed again—howled. The three boys in front of them were all staring up intently.

It lasted forever. Remus wanted to dig a hole in the floor of the tunnel and bury himself in it. He could taste the fear in the air, the wire-tight tension. This had been a bad idea. This was—

“Oh, calm down,” Sirius said quietly, as the boys transformed, the world warped, and Padfoot rocketed forward. “It’s not so bad as all that.”

They all clamoured into the house, Prongs somewhat inelegantly, and Remus watched as Padfoot barked eagerly and ran over to—him. The curled-up wolf, already looking a little worse for wear, snarling at his visitors. Everything was monochrome and Padfoot was larger than normal and everything smelled too strongly. Padfoot stopped a few feet away and lowered his head to the ground, whined plaintively. The wolf—Remus, it was Remus—raised his head tentatively and sniffed. Padfoot yelped again and rolled over, tail wagging, and the wolf—good lord, Remus thought faintly, he was large, or was that just how Sirius saw him?—stood up, slunk over, and sniffed him. He growled and then rubbed his face in Padfoot’s face, and the room changed: the air turned warm and sweet and the wolf looked even more majestically beautiful. Padfoot leaped up and knocked the wolf on his back, and then they went around again, smelling each other and biting each other, barking, speaking in their own secret tongue.

“I think Prongsie and Wormtail often get quite bored during this bit,” Sirius told him. “They’d be rubbish corralling you without me, you know.”

“When was this?” Remus asked faintly.

“Last month,” Sirius said, and then the wolf and the dog were racing down the tunnel, and the stag with the rat after them.

“I don’t know how it would work in the forest,” Sirius mused, “if you can’t run around after them at the right speed.”

Remus didn’t want to look at him, didn’t know where to look that wasn’t at Sirius, and then the memory faded around them and they were standing next to the Pensieve in the classroom.

“It was awful for a while last year,” Sirius said, attempting to sound casual and failing. “But it’s all right again now. You like me again.”

“I see,” Remus managed. Sirius coughed awkwardly and tugged at his hair.

“Why couldn’t James see yours?” Sirius asked. “Is he just exceptionally dense, or—there must have been a reason. Though he _is_ exceptionally dense.”

“I think my brain was protecting itself from being embarrassed,” Remus said as clinically as he could, “because I was remembering things—it was—it wasn’t, ah, accurate. And I, well—I’ve had a lot of practise at that sort of thing.” He coughed. “Deception. You know.”

“What,” Sirius said very deliberately, “wasn’t accurate?” Remus couldn’t bear to look at him.

“It was from the end of fourth year,” he began—oh, Christ, his voice had gone all high—“and I had, ah, I had really sort of an awful crush on, on, well anyway it was very clear, from the, ah, the memory—you could—you could see, um, from the way I had—recalled—it wasn’t how it—it wasn’t—oh, I don’t want to talk about this,” he finished miserably, cheeks flaming. “Anyway at the end you turned into Padfoot which never happened because we were sitting on the lawn in broad daylight so obviously I was conflating memories and that was part of why I wanted to try out more. Also. Anyway.”

Sirius had frozen next to him. “Moony,” he said slowly. “Remus. I think I need some additional information.”

“Please let’s leave it,” Remus said, “I really don’t—”

“I assume,” Sirius said, speaking over him, “you didn’t have a crush on James.”

“ _No_ ,” Remus said, making a face. “God. No.”

“Ah,” said Sirius. Remus finally turned to look at him. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes looked slightly manic. “And do you—last year—”

“Well I was very angry,” Remus said, voice sliding up again. Sirius was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. He had somehow even managed to bypass the horrors of puberty; he’d had about four spots ever in his life, by Remus’ count. He was looking at Remus like whatever Remus said next would decide the entire course of his life. Remus thought he might pass out.

“Remus,” Sirius said, and took a deep breath. He looked at the ceiling and then took another deep breath, and clenched his hands together. “The way James gets about Evans—that’s—that’s how I—”

“Oh, hell,” Remus said, and stumbled forward to kiss him.

**2.**

Sirius was lying on the couch, reading one of Remus’ trashy romance novels (“Those are my _mother’s_ trashy romance novels, I’ll thank you to remember”) and trying not to think of the sight of Wilma Feinhardt’s lifeless body on the lawn in front of her parents’ house when Remus apparated practically on top of him and knocked them both onto the ground.

“Oi,” Sirius started, annoyed, and then realised that Remus was shaking and pale and sweating and looked generally as though he was about to faint. “Remus,” he started—

Remus grabbed his shirt and began speaking frantically, panting with exhaustion. “James and Lily—you have to—they saw, they saw everything, they made me—you have to tell them, you have to, to, you have to go—”

“Remus,” said Sirius, “what are you—”

“They—Imperius—” Remus gasped. His eyes were spinning around the room, looking for something that wasn’t there. “They, they made me—I tried, but, but, Sirius, you _have to go tell Lily and James_ —”

Sirius suddenly felt cold all over. He gently tipped Remus, who was still babbling, onto the floor, whispered, “Sorry,” and apparated with a crack to James and Lily’s house.

It wasn’t quite accurate to call it their house; they had only been living there for two months and it had come pre-furnished. Lily hadn’t bothered with decorating as she had (rightly, apparently) assumed that they would have to move again in short order. She and James were sitting at the kitchen table when Sirius appeared in the doorway and stumbled into the room.

“The Death Eaters got to Remus,” he told them, “they Imperiused him to find out where you’ve been hiding. You need to get out, now.”

James went dead white and then ran up the stairs while Lily picked up the three framed photos she had put on the mantel: one of all of them at Hogwarts, one of Lily and James at their wedding, and one of Harry as a newborn. James was back down in an instant with their emergency bag and she handed him the photos before picking up Harry, who was, somehow, still sleeping. “We’ll Floo you,” she told Sirius. “Get out of here.”

“Don’t—” James started, and then Lily had apparated them both away. Sirius stood panting in the empty house for a moment—there was still something boiling on the stove, still steaming mugs of tea on the table, still the milky scent of baby everywhere—and apparated back to the flat.

Remus had rolled over and been sick on the floor. Sirius crouched next to him and rolled him back onto his side. His eyes were wide and his jaw was clattering. “Remus,” Sirius said, uselessly. _Please_ , he thought, _don’t be brain damaged_. He had been the one to find Séan McNally after the Death Eaters had scrambled his mind; he had been sitting on the floor of his flat, muttering gibberish, and hadn’t recognised Sirius even though they’d been going on patrols together for six months. He was in St Mungo’s for life now.

“Come on,” he told Remus, and hauled him up and into the loo, where he vomited spectacularly into the toilet. His forehead was clammy and his hands shook where they clutched the toilet bowl. When he finally finished, Sirius handed him a glass of water that he drank straight down. Sirius winced, and filled the glass up again.

He peeled Remus’ sweaty clothes off of him and steered him into without much difficulty. When he crouched down next to him he saw that Remus’ eyes were clearer: he was looking at Sirius like he knew him and wanted to try to convey something to him without speaking. Sirius pressed their hands together and Remus clutched his, tight.

“I tried,” he whispered. “Sirius, I—I tried, I tried so hard not to tell them. It went on for so long.” He paused. “It felt like a long time. They always said—they always said it wasn’t supposed to hurt,” he said in a small voice.

Sirius pushed his hair back from his forehead and Remus closed his eyes for a moment.

“I don’t remember who was there,” he continued, trying to sound calm, objective. “They had masks, obviously, but I think I recognised one or two of the voices—but—I can’t remember it properly, it’s all jumbled up in my head, like they, they put it through a blender or something. Is that supposed to happen?”

“No,” said Sirius. “Whoever it was must have done a piss-poor job of it.”

“I tried,” Remus said again, sounding so, so tired, “not to tell them. But—I couldn’t do it. And then I wanted to try to apparate to their house, but—I couldn’t remember where they live,” he whispered, staring up at Sirius with wide eyes. “I couldn’t even remember where we live. I just thought—Sirius, I have to go to Sirius, I thought—as hard as I could. I guess it’s good I didn’t apparate inside you. I didn’t know you could do that. Just think of a person.”

“Me neither,” said Sirius.

“I’m sorry,” Remus whispered.

“It’s not your fault,” Sirius told him, and pressed his thumb against the tear rolling over Remus’ nose.

“I know,” Remus started, pressing his eyes closed, “I know you all think—”

“Stop it,” Sirius told him, and sat next to the bed, stroking his hair until he had fallen asleep.

A few hours later, while he was pacing up and down in the living room, James appeared, sooty, in the fireplace. “Hallo,” he said, “what a fucking night.”

“Hallo yourself,” said Sirius.

“Come on,” James said, “Lily wants to see you, too.”

So they both stepped into the fireplace and James Flooed them to the newest safehouse, which was in the middle of a field somewhere; from the window Sirius could see one tree in the distance, in the moonlight, and a few cows sleeping. “Bucolic,” he told James.

“Yes, well,” James said, a little sourly, and stalked off into the kitchen to make some tea.

“How is Remus?” Lily asked from where she was sitting on the couch. She had Harry, who appeared delighted by the activity and company at such a late hour, sitting on her lap, or rather resting against her stomach, as he didn’t yet have the muscles to sit upright himself. He smiled hugely at Sirius, a wide toothless grin, and Sirius smiled back even though he felt like death on two legs. Babies were like that, little joy factories; you couldn’t resist them. And Harry was an angelic child, hardly ever upset, which Sirius suspected was less a function of disposition than a learned response to crisis. He tried not to think too much about Harry, five months old, knowing not to cry because it would make trouble for his parents; it reminded him too much of his own childhood, even though the circumstances were of course different. It just wasn’t fair—none of it was fair.

“Sleeping,” said Sirius. “Wrung-out. He was sick all over the rug. Brain a bit scrambled but he’ll be all right, I think. He couldn’t remember where any of us lived, apparated right on top of me because he was just trying to apparate to—well, me.”

“That’s not possible,” James said shortly as he came back in the door.

“According to whom?” Sirius asked, as pleasantly as he could. “All kinds of impossible things have been happening recently, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Not that kind of impossible thing.”

“The only impossible magic is necromancy,” Sirius told him, “as you well know. If you had paid any attention in Advanced Magical Theory—”

“Oh, please, as though you listened to a word that old wanker—”

“If you had paid any attention,” Sirius continued, talking over him, “or had a fragment of imagination left in your body, you would know that magic is changeable, that spellwork is just a superficial method for channelling larger forces that most people, yourself apparently included, don’t care to engage with because they’re too large and complicated and frightening, and—”

“You sound like a lunatic,” James said, “I don’t want to hear any more of this.”

“Am I or am I not correct, Evans?” Sirius asked. He felt like his skin was on fire and about to peel off of his body.

“Perfectly so,” she said calmly, bouncing Harry up and down on her knees. “James, you may recall that after Sirius and Remus finally—you know—the entirety of Gryffindor tower burst into bloom. I had violets growing out of my bedposts. An unconscious expression of ardour, I believe was how Professor Martinson put it. That was the only time I ever saw him excited about anything.”

“I can’t believe the two of you,” James said. “Do I need to lay it out? One, Remus gives up our whereabouts. Yes, yes, I know, but it’s not like they went after _you_ , did they, because they knew you _wouldn’t_. Two, they _let him go_ , for some insane reason, instead of just killing him, which they clearly should have, since it’s not like they’ve had any problems doing that to anybody else. Three, he apparates to you instead of here to warn us—”

“Yeah, and I went straight to you, and you got out, didn’t you—”

“So _what_ ,” James shouted. “How do you not see that this is, is—inexplicable behaviour?” His face was red and pained. “I don’t _like_ this, you know. I don’t _want_ this to be true—”

“Oh, because it kind of seems like—”

“You don’t get it, you don’t understand what it’s like to have to keep doing this, it’s not happening to you,” James said. “You’re not the one who has a baby somebody is _trying to kill_!”

Harry, helpfully, chose this moment to start wailing.

“Oh, would both of you just shut up,” Lily said wearily. “Here, you take him,” she told James, and thrust Harry in his face. “I think he needs changing. There are nappies in the bag.”

“I need a fag,” Sirius said, and stomped outside, slamming the door behind him.

Lily appeared a few moments later. “Sorry,” she said. “He’s gotten a bit—well.” She sighed. “It’s all been very difficult for him.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sirius said, kicking his book against the house. “I’m not exactly having a great time of it either, you know.”

“I know,” she said. “I keep thinking—it would be so much different, if none of this were happening. We’d just have a flat in London, and have normal jobs, and come round to yours after work. We wouldn’t be married, or have a baby, or even be thinking about it—”

“Except that James has been thinking about knocking you up since he was about fourteen.”

She made a face. “Well, all right. But you know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” he said. He fished his cigarettes out of his jacket and lit one. Remus kept telling him that they would kill him, and Sirius kept arguing that if there was one benefit to the almost certain knowledge that you were going to die prematurely, it was getting to smoke as many fags as you fucking well pleased.

“Hand that over,” Lily said, holding her hand out.

“Why, Evans,” he said, passing her the cigarette, “you delinquent.”

“Harry’s not nursing anymore,” she said, “so I can do exactly as I like, thanks very much.”

“Why not?”

“It never agreed with me,” she said with a shrug. “And anyhow, if I die and he’s already on formula, it’ll be easier for everybody after, to adjust.”

“Always planning ahead.” That was what he liked about Lily. She had no use for sentiment. The war was making James slowly lose his mind, but it had simply revealed Lily’s cold focus and determination. She panicked at nothing, she did not second-guess herself, she did not blink. He wondered which one of them Harry would be like, or if he would be like neither, or if he would die before he could even talk. Sirius probably wouldn’t live to see it, so it was useless to speculate.

“I do know,” he said after he had lit a second cigarette, “that it has to be someone.”

“I know you do,” she said. She sounded very tired. “I do, too. But I can’t work out who it could be. James thinks it must be everybody, you know, not just Remus—except you, of course.”

“What an honour,” Sirius muttered.

“But it _can’t_ be Remus,” she said. “It just can’t be. It isn’t possible, it just—of all the people. I remember him coming to the hospital, to see Harry… you know Remus, he’s normally so stoical, and he just sat there touching his head and crying. He was so happy. He picked out five books he thought every child should have and brought them over all wrapped up. And one of them was _Great Expectations_ , of all things.”

“Only Remus,” Sirius agreed. He remembered the days after Harry’s birth, too, when James was sending them owls constantly, with photos attached, and he and Remus could talk of nothing else. He’d found Remus crying in the loo in the middle of the night, trying not to wake him. “What’s wrong?” he’d asked, and Remus had just gestured helplessly and said, “That little baby—he shouldn’t have to—” and then cried some more. So they had curled up in bed and Sirius had spun an elaborate tale of Harry’s future life at Hogwarts, and Remus had laughed, and touched his face, and they had both fallen asleep.

But you could interpret all that in different ways.

“He wasn’t faking, today,” Sirius told Lily. “I don’t think anybody could fake anything that successfully. He was really ill.”

“I believe you,” she said. Neither of them said the other thing: _So who is it, then?_

“Have you ever been Imperiused?” she asked a minute later, thoughtfully.

“No,” Sirius said. “I think they do it in Auror training, but as you know we never made it that far.”

“It seems like something the Order should do.”

“Take it up with Dumbledore,” he told her. “As you may or may not have noticed, despite its name, the Order of the Phoenix is not exactly what I would call ‘ordered,’ or even ‘organised.’” He paused, and stared at the ash gathering at the end of his cigarette. “For all we know they’ve been putting Imperius on someone and then oblivating them. It could be me, for all I know.”

“We should practise,” she said decisively. “We should experiment.”

“James’d loose his mind,” Sirius told her. “Go absolutely mental.”

“Well, then,” she said, “he doesn’t have to know about it.”

*

Remus slept through the night and all the morning, so Sirius left him a note to say he was out on Order business and then apparated to Lily and James’ house. James actually _was_ out on Order business, as Lily had said he would be, and Lily was reading the paper at the kitchen table. She had somehow gotten her hands on a stack of Muggle papers, the way she had at school, and was flipping through the _Guardian_ with an expression of clinical interest.

“Where’s Harry?” Sirius asked.

“Napping,” she said, “blissfully. Do you want any tea?”

“I had some before coming,” he said. “Thanks.” He felt itchy and nervous and kept thinking about Remus at home in bed, Remus alone in the apartment, everything Remus did when he wasn’t there to look. “Anything good in there?”

“Not really,” she said, “trouble in Ireland. A little piece on Wilma in the back. She made the cover of _The Sun_ , though, which I’m sure she’d consider an honour. Here.”

She passed him the paper. “MYSTERIOUS MURDER IN DERBYSHIRE – THE SILENT KILLER STRIKES AGAIN.”

“It was easier when they believed the stories about the gas leaks,” Sirius said, “and also before _The Sun_ got involved.”

“I try not to think about it too much, or I’ll give myself an ulcer,” Lily said. “Let’s go out back.”

They stood in the field behind the house with Harry’s baby monitor sitting on the stoop. “All right,” said Lily. “Shall you go first, or shall I?”

“You can do me,” Sirius said, feeling chivalrous, thinking: _If I fuck up your brain James will come to my flat and murder me, and I’ll be on the front page of_ The Sun.

“All right,” Lily said, and took a deep breath. “I tried to remember what we learned about this in Defence—whether they told us how to fight it off—but I couldn’t. So, just, you know. Try.”

“Thanks, Evans, that was really helpful, I’ll make sure to do that.”

“Piss off. All right. Here we go.” She raised her wand and narrowed her eyes. “ _Imperius_.”

He blinked. Nothing had happened. They wouldn’t be able to practise defending themselves, he thought, if Lily couldn’t do the spell properly, but that was fine—what were they really worried about, anyway? Everything, he felt quite certain, would be fine.

“Um,” Lily was saying. “Touch your nose.”

He touched his nose. He probably ought to tell Lily that the curse hadn’t worked, but surely she had figured that out herself by now.

“Touch your toes?”

He bent and touched his toes. He was thinking about Remus now, Remus’ hair when the sunlight came through the windows and lit it up in bed; normally it was brown but in the bright sun you could see flecks of gold—like Remus’ eyes—his slow smile, still somehow shy after all these years, the same smile he had had as a fourteen-year-old when Sirius had flirted with him without realising what he was doing, back when they had both been knobby-kneed and growing faster than their brains could process, hormone factories, huddled together on Remus’ bed, unthinking, only that wasn’t right, Remus had been thinking, Remus had known and hidden it all away until Sirius worked it out himself and he had forgiven him even though Sirius had betrayed him and Sirius loved him, he felt slightly crazy with the force of it, the intensity of the knowledge that he would do anything for him, would die if he had to, even if—even if—

He blinked. Lily looked unsettled. “What?” he said.

“Well,” she said, “I think I understand the scale of the problem now.”

“What?” he asked again.

“You’ve got your jacket on backwards,” she told him, and he looked down and saw that he had.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Yes, quite.”

“Do it again,” he said. It wasn’t any better the second time.

They spent two hours at it, interrupted by one feeding, after which Lily guiltily put Harry back to sleep by magic. Lily was slightly better at resisting than Sirius was—Sirius was hopeless—but not by very much. It was largely, he thought, a complete failure. When they had given up, they sat on the back steps and smoked, staring at the cloudy sky and the expanse of nothing around the house.

“It would seem,” Sirius said, feeling both ill and, somehow, grimly satisfied on Remus’ behalf, “James’ faith in me has been misplaced.”

“You’re supposed to be able to fight it off,” Lily said. “That’s what we were always told.”

“You probably can,” Sirius said, “and learning how probably takes longer than two hours. Or they’re full of shite, and it’s impossible.”

“Theory,” Lily said, “and practise. Do you know, that class wasn’t practically useful at all—hah, hah—but it may have sort of accidentally been the most useful thing I took at Hogwarts.”

“That’s because you actually paid attention,” Sirius told her.

“I mean it,” she said. “We were always taught the rules for how things worked as though there were no exceptions, as though it was all some kind of mechanical process. Which you and I both know isn’t the case at all. Your magic is different than mine. I know it sounds bad to say that given—everything—but it’s _true_. It’s in, well, your blood.”

Sirius shifted uncomfortably and said, “James is a pure-blood, too, and he may be a great wizard but—you know. And let’s not even discuss Peter.”

“Right,” said Lily, “it’s not like all this hierarchical eugenicist nonsense is true. I’m a better witch than James is a wizard, though please don’t tell him I said that. Not by much, but—well, we both know it’s true.” It was. “And Peter’s sort of hopeless. But you have something I don’t—and James doesn’t either—some old magic, inside of you; it’s the reason you manifested flowers all over the tower the first time you and Remus shagged. And Remus is different, too—he’s a half-blood but he’s a werewolf and so he has this whole other sense of things. He’d hate to hear me say that, too, because he just wants to be normal, but it’s not a bad thing, it’s just _true_. Everything we learned at school was true up to a point, but it was like, like—the first layer of things. And really magic is this huge river, or ocean, or something, I know this sounds stupid, I probably sound like a lunatic. But I think that’s the only way you could break these spells. I don’t think there’s some kind of counter-spell, I think it’s just—just—” She spread her hands out wide. “You know what I’m saying! Magic isn’t _rational_. It’s bigger, it’s deeper, it’s older than that. _Do_ you know what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” said Sirius. “Yes, Evans, you’re mad and you should never say any of that in public or you’d be flogged but you’re brilliant. I’ll even acknowledge my family history in deference to your larger point.” He looked out at the field. “Do you remember, when we were using the Pensieves—”

“How could I forget—”

“Well, James couldn’t see any of Remus’ memory at all. It was just a fog. That’s not supposed to happen.”

Lily hummed noncommittally.

“I could,” said Sirius. “We practised more after.”

“I don’t think that really means anything,” Lily said gently. “I don’t think it’s some kind of—grand sign.”

“I don’t know,” Sirius said. He stared at the ground. “I keep thinking about it.”

“If anything,” she said, “it only proves my point, which is that there are no rules, and everything is about emotion ultimately. Of course he let you into his head, he loved you.”

“Let’s try it again,” Sirius said. “Just one more time.”

They put out their cigarettes and stood on the field again. Sirius looked up at the sky and thought about the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black, of the magic he had done as a child, to protect himself, to amuse Regulus. All the things he had done with no deliberate intention at all. Lily was right: it was like a river, running under and inside everything, every tree, every stone, every person. It was, for better or worse, in his blood.

He cracked his neck and smiled crookedly. “All right, Evans. Do your worst.”

As the spell came down over him he felt, again, that sense of absent, vague bliss that he had been experiencing intermittently all afternoon. He was here with Lily, and Harry, whom he loved, standing behind their little blue house. He yawned.

“Sing ‘Video Killed the Radio Star,’” Lily said.

Sirius opened his mouth obligingly. James and Lily had played that song at their New Year’s party last year, he remembered—Sirius had called them hopelessly mainstream—Lily had shook her finger at him and sang along theatrically while James laughed hysterically in the corner and Peter shook his head, and then Sirius had made Remus dance even though Remus Did Not Dance, and Remus had turned bright red and muttered awkwardly and laughed at Sirius’ ridiculous moves and they had done shots and played the record again and James had yelled at him for sucking on Remus’ neck in broad daylight (“It’s eleven o’clock at night you absolute wanker!”) while all the girls cat-called.

He opened his mouth and then frowned.

“Sing ‘Video Killed the Radio Star,’” Lily said.

He saw Remus dancing—and then again—like a scratched record—something was wrong. It was all wrong. He was grinding his teeth together and his jaw was begging to unclench. The words were right there. No no no no no no. A secret private thing. Remus’ soft hair at the back of his neck. Already turning grey. The terror of the passage of time. Apparating back to the flat, half-on-top of the bed and falling onto the floor, Sirius with a bump on his head the size of a fist. Hysterical laughter. They were drunk. They were stoned. It was a new decade. Here’s to the future! The next day Priya Bhatt, three years ahead of them in Gryffindor and a member of the Order, had turned up dead.

“No,” whispered Sirius.

Lily lifted the curse. “Let’s stop for now,” she said kindly. “You look like you’re about to have an aneurism.” He was crying, he realised. Inside she let him hold Harry, who pulled at his hair and shrieked with laughter when he made funny faces or poked a finger in his stomach. Harry the unnaturally well-behaved baby. Harry the cure-all. Harry: the future, if he lived long enough. Sirius held him until he started whining for Lily and then gave him back to her, and went home.

•••

When Remus woke up, the flat was empty. He shuffled into the kitchen to find a note from Sirius— _Out on Order business, back later xxS_ —and then shuffled into the loo to sit in the bathtub with the shower running for a while. He lost track of the time. He wasn’t entirely sure whether it had all happened yesterday, or the day before, or for how long he had slept. He was very hungry and also very nauseous. As a compromise he ate plain buttered toast, which helped with the hunger, and didn’t help with the nausea.

He lay on the couch in his damp bathrobe and stared at the ceiling, trying to piece together what had happened. He had been walking to the tube from the Royal Society of Magic—most of the other students apparated straight home, but he liked to walk, to watch people on the tube; spending the entire day in the flat and the Royal Society was claustrophobic and depressing. And he had wanted to buy a book at the bookshop near their flat. He couldn’t remember the title but the cover was red, he thought. So he had walked along the park to go to the station, as he usually did on the days he attended classes at the Royal Society, and then—then—he had been somewhere else. So someone, or multiple someones, must have stopped him, and apparated elsewhere. It had been dark but surely someone had seen, so they must have left somebody behind to oblivate bystanders. He couldn’t remember exactly what the room had looked like, the room where they had taken him: but it had been a fine room; the carpet had been soft under his hands. With gas lamps. He didn’t know why he remembered the gas lamps. Inside one of the old pure-blood mansions, like the house Sirius had grown up in. Maybe it _was_ the house Sirius had grown up in.

They had learned about Imperius in seventh year, in Defence Against the Dark Arts, along with the other Unforgivable Curses, though of course they all knew about them already, especially since by the middle of seventh year the deaths were piling up in Britain, and everybody knew that they were being carried out with Avada Kedavra: no marks, no blood, open eyes. Neither Avada Kedavra nor Crucio was terribly difficult to understand, but Imperius was more complex. Remus had had questions, at the time, though he had kept them mostly to himself, and instead consulted as many books as he could find in the library. It did not do to ask too many questions about the Unforgivable Curses.

He mainly wondered how people under Imperius could perform actions that they would not be able to perform under usual circumstances—yes, yes, _magic_ , but it still didn’t make sense to him—and also what happened to the mind after the fact. Did you remember everything? Did you realise what had happened? According to the books, cases varied. _Oblivate_ was often used in conjunction. Most of the books, which had generally been written centuries earlier, did not discuss the possibility of incompetent spell-casting, or referred to it only obliquely. Professor Edwards, who had taught them Defence, had similarly referred to this possibility only as an aside. Remus remembered wondering about it and trying to read about it but finding little information. He had not realised until Séan McNally’s brain got scrambled that it was possible for Imperius to destroy a person’s mind, and then had dug into the stacks at the library at the Royal Society and found that, in fact, considerable work had been done on the subject by contemporary scholars. Why, he wondered, weren’t any of these books in the Hogwarts library, even the Restricted Section? There was so much they had not learned in school, he was discovering, so much that his professors had protected them from, deliberately or not. Perhaps in other times that had not mattered so much—but now, in this time of war, it seemed to matter a great deal.

They had not trained them to withstand Imperius at Hogwarts, either, because it was Not Done; performing the Unforgivable Curses, even with the best of intentions, was strictly forbidden. And they had not done it at the Order, either, even though that surely would have been helpful—as he now knew. The Order, for all its ambitions, was more a ragtag collective than a functional army; they scrambled to try to protect people and find out information and died one by one. Remus felt much older than twenty most of the time but occasionally he remembered that most of them weren’t older than twenty-five and, ultimately, didn’t really know what they were doing. He knew that Sirius would have scoffed at that kind of talk—Sirius had thought he was an adult from the age of fifteen—and Remus didn’t have a great deal of faith in authority figures anyhow. But it was often hard not to feel that they were in over their heads. Only Dumbledore seemed to really know anything, and he was not fond of sharing.

So he had been in the room with the gas lamps.

He remembered what the spell felt like: his mind immediately disordered. It still felt that way, only less intensely, as though the spell had cast a shadow in his mind that had not faded. How to describe what had happened? He tried to think of words for it—things were always easier if you could write them down—but all he could recall was the schizoid sensation of numb powerlessness and abject panic. They had wanted to know where James and Lily were, of course, and he hadn’t wanted to tell them. Strange things had happened in his mind as they tried to get the information out of him, further splinterings; he was so many of himself at the same time. He kept remembering things: James’ hysterical laughter when he told Remus that he had been made Head Boy; Sirius on the Hogwarts Express First Year, sulking and refusing to speak for about five minutes until he started talking and couldn’t stop; Lily hexing James (literally) blue; Sirius pressed behind him under the invisibility cloak, whispering foul things in his ear when Remus thought it was all just a joke; James and Lily sprawled out on chairs at the end of their wedding, stuffing themselves on cake; Harry sleeping in the hospital, the first day he was alive, an entirely new consciousness, born into a world eating itself alive.

It hurt, it hurt, it hurt; there was a voice in his head asking him WHERE ARE JAMES AND LILY POTTER, he threw up on the soft carpet, his stomach cramped, his head split in two, no no no no no I won’t I won’t tell you, James’ bone-weary face when he told him what had happened with Snape, Sirius crying next to his bed, Peter looking away from him when they first found out, James avoiding his eyes now, they all thought he was the spy, werewolves can’t be trusted, bad seeds, STAMP THEM OUT, Sirius asking where he’d been, PUT THEM DOWN, you’re just a fucking animal Lupin get away from me I’ll tell the whole school I’ll tell everyone, his parents crying over his hospital bed, what’s wrong Mummy what’s wrong, it hurt it hurt it hurt they’re in Surrey they’re in Epsom in a white house with a blue door on a street with seven other houses it’s a fifteen minute walk from the train station it always smells of mint I don’t know the street I don’t know the street it’s next to a park there’s a cat who lives on the street and doesn’t belong to anyone you walk past a church to get there I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know—

Then he blacked out and when he came back he couldn’t remember anything except that James and Lily and the baby, what was the baby’s name, were in danger and that he needed to tell someone. What did their house look like. A big nothing. Okay he would go home and tell Sirius. What did the flat look like. A big nothing. Okay he would go to Sirius. He clutched his wand and closed his eyes and thought Sirius Sirius Sirius the feel of his hair under his fingers the pale pools of his eyes the three moles on his left shoulder blade his perfect teeth his maniac smile his disgusting cigarette habit his outrageous hubris his leather jacket his kind hands and then he was on top of him on the couch and they were both crashing to the floor.

He was feeling queasy again when the fireplace flashed green and Albus Dumbledore walked out of it and into the room.

He was not, he remembered, wearing any pants under the robe, and hurried to pull it closed as Dumbledore looked over at him and smiled over his glasses. “Remus,” he said. “James tells me you’ve been in distress.” Dumbledore loved euphemism.

“Yes,” Remus said, “well.” He wasn’t sure what to say next. Words still seemed difficult. He wished Sirius were here, even if Sirius did suspect him. He was so tired.

Dumbledore summoned one of their rickety kitchen chairs and sat down next to the couch as Remus struggled to sit up while holding the robe closed. It would have been more embarrassing, he suspected, if he had not utterly lost the ability to be embarrassed by anything some time ago.

“Please,” Dumbledore said, “do tell me what happened.”

Remus swallowed. How to put into words what was going on in his head? The more boring the better, he supposed. “I was walking back to the tube from the Royal Society,” he said. “And—well, I don’t remember it very well. A group of Death Eaters must have—taken me. I was in a house—an old house—and they put Imperius on me. I don’t remember anything about them, just—just the spell. It was…” He trailed off. How to describe it. “It was like my brain was breaking in half,” he said finally, insufficiently. “I don’t know. It went on and on. It hurt so much. I tried—I really tried—not to tell them. Where James and Lily were. That was what they wanted to know—obviously. But eventually I just… I couldn’t. And then I passed out. And I couldn’t remember where they lived, or Harry’s name, or even where I lived. So I just thought about Sirius and apparated to him. On top of him. I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Many things are possible beyond the realm of the known,” Dumbledore said.

“I don’t know why they didn’t kill me,” Remus said. He stared at his hands where they were clutching his robe in his lap. “I can’t figure out—I don’t know.” He looked up at Dumbledore. “It’s not me,” he croaked. “It’s—it’s not me. I know everybody thinks it is.”

“Perhaps,” Dumbledore said, “they have left you alive precisely to further that suspicion.”

“I don’t know how to convince them,” Remus said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I am sorry,” Dumbledore said. “I will, of course, need to inspect your memories myself. I may be able to see something that you have not been able to parse on your own.”

“You don’t have to pretend,” Remus said. “I know you want to know whether or not I’m lying.”

Dumbledore looked at him kindly. It would be easier to hate Dumbledore, Remus thought, if he were simply unfeeling—but he wasn’t. He just didn’t let his feelings get in the way of what he thought he needed to do.

“I’m not,” Remus said, though he knew it was pointless. “I’m not lying.”

“Then this will be over quickly,” said Dumbledore.

The Order _had_ organised Occlumency training, sporadically and without any real structure, but a slightly older wizard called Boris Menshikov had been the best Occlumens of the group (barring, of course, Dumbledore) and now that he was dead the efforts had fallen by the wayside. Remus had been moderately better than Lily and James and considerably better than Sirius, who was not naturally given to deception. But he was, he knew, no match for Dumbledore, and resisting would be held against him, so—it was useless.

“Well, carry on them,” Remus mumbled, and looked up into Dumbledore’s bright blue eyes.

It was different, having Dumbledore inside his mind: even Boris Menshikov had not felt like this, had not been so all-encompassing. At first it was not exactly unpleasant. He could feel someone else peering around, politely curious, taking stock. And then Remus’ mind was nudged toward what had happened. He tried to breathe slowly and not cause trouble. Distantly he could feel himself shaking as it all happened again. None of it was clearer now than it had been when he tried to piece things back together before Dumbledore arrived. _Is this enough_ , he thought, _is this enough to prove that I’m not lying_ —

But then Dumbledore kept going, farther and farther in: classes at the Royal Society, shifts in the research library, hours spent mindlessly copy editing monographs and dissertations, trips to Cornwall to meet with werewolves there to futilely attempt to evangelise to them about the Order of the Phoenix, James’ suspicious looks at dinners with him and Lily and Sirius, Sirius Sirius Sirius—he had to stop him, it needed to stop, he tried to put Sirius somewhere deep in the back of his mind and think about anything else, build a wall, you can’t have it, that’s the one thing you can’t have, but of course he could have it, there was nothing Remus could do, and then he was surgically examining everything Remus remembered and thought about Sirius from childhood to adulthood, nauseatingly quickly, his boyhood hero-worshipping crush to his horrible rage to his adult love, the embarrassment he had felt the first time he had deliberately taken all his clothes off in front of Sirius—no no no why this—and Sirius had just laughed and turned a little pink himself and—everything else that had happened—all the lazy mornings on the couch in pyjamas doing the crossword—Sirius’ punk records that Remus couldn’t stand but pretended not to mind because Sirius loved them—arguments about James, arguments about Harry, arguments about Everything Happening Right Now, arguments before and during and after getting trashed, apologies during and after getting trashed, Sirius’ hand in his hair, Sirius’ warm body, his cold nose, his desperation to be loved, his paranoia, his longing, his electric charisma, how bewildering it was that he had chosen to direct all of it at Remus, to place Remus first above all others, except that he hadn’t really done that had he.

“Stop,” Remus whispered, tears streaming down his face. “Stop.”

And then his mind was his own again. Dumbledore handed him a handkerchief and said nothing for a while as he cried. “I am sorry,” he said again, and it sounded like he meant it. “I am sorry, Remus.”

“It isn’t me,” Remus choked out, and Dumbledore patted him on the shoulder.

“I know,” he said.

He told him that he should get some rest and that he would be in touch later in the week, and then he left. When Sirius apparated into the flat shortly after—or maybe it wasn’t shortly, Remus had no way of telling—Remus was still sitting on the couch, wearing only his robe, crying into a lavender handkerchief.

“I picked up,” Sirius started, and then dropped whatever it was he had picked up on the table. “Remus?”

It was hard to put words together. “Remus,” Sirius said again, after he had sat down next to him. He touched his shoulder gingerly and Remus only sobbed harder.

 _I ought to tell him I’m not brain damaged_ , Remus thought distantly, although he wasn’t sure that was true. He took a few gasping breaths and tried to speak.

“Dumbledore—he—he—”

“He was here?”

“He—” Remus gestured vaguely at his head. As though that would help with anything. “He looked,” he tried again.

“He looked in your mind,” Sirius said. Sirius had always been so clever. “To see what happened?”

“Everything,” Remus choked. “Everything.”

Sirius was very stiff next to him. He rubbed his fingers against his robe and tried to calm down. “Sorry,” he managed, and wiped at his eyes. He didn’t know how to explain what had happened. Instead he slumped over, into Sirius’ side. “Sorry,” he said again.

Sirius curled his arm around him and pushed his hair out of his face. “Fuck Dumbledore,” he said, and Remus choked out a laugh into his shoulder.

“He knows what you look like naked, now.”

“Old pervert.” His hand on Remus’ head was gentle.

“I don’t think I’m brain-damaged,” Remus told him. “I’m just very tired.”

“As long as they didn’t mess up that big brain,” Sirius said quietly, “then where would I be?”

Remus closed his eyes and thought about Sirius on the Hogwarts Express, age eleven. He thought Sirius kept talking, but very quickly he was asleep, dreaming of the moon.

**An Interlude.**

It happened like this:

At first he remembered the class when they had learned about Dementors, and what they did. He knew, of course, what they were; he had grown up in an old family rife with dark magic. But as a child they had been the vague bogeymen of fairy tales that he had told to scare Regulus—monsters that ate your _soul_ —and not a practical concern. Members of the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black did not, after all, get sent to Azkaban.

Professor Edwards had been lecturing them about the Dementor’s Kiss and the less extreme process by which they leeched out a person’s happy memories, leaving only misery and guilt behind. Now that he thought about it, he realised that Edwards had been trying to convey some sort of subtle anti-incarceration message in that lecture, which of course nobody recognised as such, because it was a summer day near the end of fourth year and everybody was too busy staring out the window, waiting to be released to go outside, or speculating about the end-of-year Quidditch final, which sadly did not include Gryffindor.

Sirius and James had been passing notes back and forth about the Quidditch, assessing the Ravenclaw players’ strengths and weaknesses and the likelihood that they could beat the Slytherin team, which unfortunately was _very_ good that year (and had, ultimately, won). At least, that was how the note-passing began; as he recalled, it had spiralled out of control into one of James’ vaguely hysterical fantasies about Evans, which Sirius dealt with by tossing crumpled bits of paper at the back of Remus’ head until he turned around and glared at him while Edwards was looking in the opposite direction, and then started scribbling irritated notes as well, and Peter peered over James’ shoulder to try to see what all the fuss was about.

Remus at fifteen had had a mild rash of acne across his nose about which he was hopelessly self-conscious, which Sirius had found particularly absurd given that James’ acne was so bad that it looked, as Evans put it, “like he was allergic to his own face,” and Peter kept picking at his spots so compulsively that he was left with awful, permanent pockmarks after the fact. Sirius himself had been, according to Remus, “immune to the cruelties of puberty,” although it hadn’t exactly felt like that at the time; he hadn’t had spots or greasy hair or bad body odour but he had felt awkward and uncomfortable in his skin just like everybody else—it was just that that tended to happen around Remus, whom he was always trying to impress, or make laugh, or blush, and when he succeeded he felt strange and embarrassed and emboldened. He hadn’t realised until after the whole mess with Snape, The Incident as it came to be known, that these strange compulsions were a symptom of infatuation.

He could remember what Remus looked like so clearly in that classroom, the image hyper-real: his eyelashes, his thatch of brown hair, his disapproving glare. Sirius had pulled a face at him and he had tried to keep looking stern and failed, and then hurried to turn around to save face.

It happened like that: everything became very sharp. Every detail was suddenly in high relief. And then they sucked it out of you. You could feel it go; it was a physical pain. The empty space in your head echoed for days. What was there? you might ask yourself, but no matter how hard you tried to remember, nothing ever came back. And then they returned, and it all began again.

**3.**

He shut up his parents’ house in Devonshire after everything had happened, did not return for over a decade. His mother had died of cancer—so pedestrian, he had thought dully at the time—early in 1981 and his father had been murdered not long after, which Remus felt would have made a stronger case for his innocence if he had not spent so many drunken hours complaining to Sirius about his father’s never-ending, suffocating guilt; his emotional detachment; his homophobia. After it had all gone to shit he had shut up the house, spelled it away into secrecy, and taken his unfinished qualification from the Royal Society to various Soviet Bloc research institutes that were in such desperate need of assistance they did not much mind his failure to have completed his MPhil in Magical Theory (a useless qualification, in any event) nor his lycanthropy nor his Englishness. He and his schoolmates had been so fixated on their own conflict that he had somewhat lost track of international Muggle politics and considered them fairly segregated from wizarding life, a point of view he quickly learned was hopelessly cloistered when he arrived in Poland in 1982 to a lab team evenly split between doctrinaire Communists and subversives who were eager to hear everything he could tell them about life in the West.

He had been working at an institute studying rusalkas outside Bern when the wall came down and had watched everyone else in the lab—many of them younger than he was—weep as they listened to the announcement on the radio. That night they went out to a wizarding bar to get drunk and all of them asked him everything they could think of about what it was like to live in England. They all wanted to live in England, except for one woman who wanted to go to Paris, and a man who wanted to go to America. He could not tell whether he had somehow made the romance of the West real for them—inexplicable, if so, given the profound and all-encompassing depression into which he had sunk in November of 1981 and not since escaped—or whether England really had been their dream all along. He told them everything he could remember about London, about Hogwarts, about the countryside. He was touched by their ability to feel excitement for the future. Many of them did leave, after that. He went to an institute in Romania.

Professor Martinson had always told them that the only impossible magic was necromancy, but time, Remus thought, was the other impossible phenomenon over which magic had no power. Yes, you could spin yourself back a few hours with a time turner, but the real accumulation of time over decades was unbreachable. He supposed that it was all connected, all boiled down to the simple fact that death was inevitable. But time seemed to him to be its own inexplicable magic. Maybe it was only his particular situation, the complete extermination of meaning from his life at the age of twenty-one, but now that he had returned to England, and discovered that Sirius Black was not, in fact, a murderer, he found that the years he had spent in exile had begun to collapse in on themselves. In many ways, he was older than his years, but he also did felt like he had been twenty-one only yesterday. Maybe this was just what growing old was like: time stretched on, and in your memory you drifted in and out of the earlier years of your life as though no time had passed at all.

He knew sometimes people said that they forgot the faces and voices of the dead but he had never had this problem. He remembered James, and Lily, and Peter with alarming specificity, but none of them as vividly as he remembered Sirius, who of course was not actually dead. He could close his eyes and see Sirius as he had been at twenty, standing in the middle of the flat theatrically declaiming about something or other to make Remus laugh, chewing at the end of a pen while looking at the crossword, unconsciously shimmying his hips while he listened to the radio and made tea. The exact curve of his ear, jut of his jaw, line of his spine: Remus remembered all of it. His warm body piled all over Remus on the sofa, on mornings after the full moon, in bed together. The fur behind his ears when he changed his body, so easily and fluidly, which Remus had always privately envied.

It was impossible to reconcile the Sirius Black of his childhood and adolescence with the man who had murdered James and Lily and Peter and laughed maniacally as they had taken him away to rot in Azkaban for the rest of his life. Remus simply could not do it. From the beginning, Sirius had been fanatically devoted to James: James was, Remus sometimes privately joked, Sirius but boring, which of course was precisely his appeal. He was pure-blooded but not interested in any of the pure-blood customs to which Sirius had been subjected as a child, and clever and funny and kind but fundamentally a bit square. He had been obsessed with predictable boy things like Quidditch and girls (well, one girl) from the age of eleven. Sirius and Remus had rolled around laughing at James’ astonishing, impenetrable heterosexuality; it had taken him aeons to work out that Something Was Up between the two of them, and he had only realised after walking in on them in a state of undress in the dormitory, at which point he had let out a high-pitched noise, turned purple, and fled. Later he had given them a strained little speech about how he Supported Then, and All That, looking deeply constipated as he did so, until Sirius put him out of his misery with a series of foul sex jokes that made him blush and groan. James’ squareness had been a comfort as the world had begun to fall apart; he had seemed so predictable, so reliable. Until he wasn’t.

Sirius had never exactly been reliable, but Remus had always been able to predict what he would do; he often felt like he had known him forever. And yet for so long it had seemed that he had never known him at all. He had so many memories of Sirius looking at him like he was some kind of awesome heavenly body—but he had killed James and Lily and Peter—but he had gotten into a physical fight with Ewan MacDonald when he called Remus an animal under his breath at an Order meeting and that night Remus had sucked the blood from his knuckles into his mouth and Sirius had spread his hands over his scarred ribcage and told him he loved him—but he had killed James and Lily and Peter—around and around and around he went. It was an impossible problem that Remus kept telling himself he was no longer going to attempt to solve, a resolution that typically lasted until he had too much to drink. Then, of course, it had transpired that all the years he had spent agonising over that had been a waste of time, because he and everybody else had gotten it wrong.

After being let go from Hogwarts he had come back to the silent, dusty, somewhat mouldy ghost of his parents’ house in the Devonshire countryside. Being in the house made those lost years feel even more insubstantial; Hogwarts had done the same. While teaching there he had kept thinking he would turn around and see Sirius swaggering around a corner with his beloved, swaggering grin; or James trailing hopelessly after Lily; or Peter at breakfast, telling everybody the latest Puddlemere United scores. And then he would, instead, see Harry’s impossibly young face, which as everybody said was so much like James’. For the first month of the year Remus did a double-take every time he saw him, suddenly un-stuck in time. Harry reminded Remus of James in other ways: he was decent, a little bit square, a little bit thoughtless, very sincere. And he had some of Lily’s kindness and bravery. But the specificities of his parents’ personalities, their failures and strengths, had died along with them. James and Lily were only an idea to him, a story other people told him about his life.

Remus had not thought much about his parents in his lost years; he had done his best not to think much about anything at all. But as soon as he stepped back into the house he could hear his mother talking to him and see the shadow of her amongst her things. All the other deaths and griefs had somehow muted this one, this comparatively benign death by cancer, which he had not had time to think about at the time because people were trying to kill him and all his friends and all of them thought that he was responsible. He sat down in the middle of his mother’s kitchen floor and cried: suddenly he could not stop thinking about her reading to him when he was laid up as a child, injured from his transformations; her molasses biscuits, his favourite; her books. Together they had read _Great Expectations_ when he was nine, and he had followed her around the kitchen while she was cooking talking about how Estella should just marry Pip, he didn’t understand why she didn’t, and why was Miss Havisham so sad anyway, it had been a long time since she was supposed to be married. And his mother had smiled and said, oh, darling, that’s not how it works at all.

All his letters to her were in a box in her room, even the ones from first year. _Dear Mum, I have already made some friends, I met them on the train, one is called James Potter, he is very keen on Quidditch and seems very nice, and the other is Sirius Black, he is from a very old family and was supposed to be sorted into a different house but has wound up with us. I was sorted into Gryffindor which is for brave people which I am not sure is right but I am happy to be with my new friends. Sirius has told me practically everything about Hogwarts already and says it is fine if I do not know how things work – I told him that my dad was a wizard but I don’t think he thinks it counts somehow – and I don’t mind because he is already so good at magic. He made it snow inside on the train. Tomorrow we have our first classes and I will send you another letter afterwards. I miss you but it is very exciting here so do not worry about me. Everything is fine so far. Tell Dad I said hi. Love, Remus_.

And then, later: _Dear Mum, I have enclosed photos of the new flat, per your request, yes even the loo. Sirius says_ HALLO MRS LUPIN WHAT LIES IS REMUS TELLING YOU TODAY _sorry he grabbed the pen. I have banished him to the kitchen. As you can see, it is nothing too impressive but I now live in London!!! Sirius enchanted the camera to take the picture of us by itself which I don’t think worked terribly well but here we both are. If you come visit you can stay on the couch which Sirius assures me is sanitary. Love, Remus_.

By that point his father hadn’t been speaking to him; he had found out about Sirius somehow—how strange, Remus thought, that he could no longer remember how exactly it had happened, though he recalled the fallout in excruciating detail—the summer before seventh year and they had had the row to end all rows. Having a werewolf son was bad enough, Remus supposed; a queer werewolf son was too much to be endured. But there were two photos of him on the desk in his father’s study: one from childhood and one from his graduation from Hogwarts.

He passed a year cleaning and fixing up the house, going through all his parents’ things, copy editing articles and dissertations and monographs, and editing a graduate-level textbook on Magical Theory thanks to one of his professors at the Royal Society who had been disappointed he had not gone on to study for his PhD. Remus had written to him intermittently the first few years of his exile and then given up the pretence of keeping any connection to his old life, but faced with needing work in England again he was forced to shame himself into owling again, and received a long and enthusiastic letter in response, reminding him that he was still young, and a PhD not out of the question. The letter made Remus laugh. Still young, he thought, remembering Harry and his friends, their unlined faces, their belief in the ultimate fairness of the world. Instead he took the job editing the textbook.

And then, on a rainy day at the end of June in 1995, a wet, bedraggled black dog showed up at his doorstep, and collapsed before he made it inside.

*

This new Sirius was strange. For years Remus had been living with a ghost of the Sirius Black he had lived with for half his life, but the real article bore little resemblance to the person he in his mind. This Sirius was cautious, almost non-verbal, and seemed to be viewing Remus as some sort of experimental specimen whose behaviours he might come to understand if he watched him long enough.

For the first week he did little but sleep. Then he either disappeared for long stretches or haunted the living room, which looked onto the kitchen, watching Remus silently as Remus cooked, or worked, or tidied up. Remus tried to keep up a stream of chatter unless he was editing but it was difficult if Sirius wouldn’t say much of anything in response. He wondered if Azkaban really had destroyed his brain. He knew that he remembered enough to know who he was, and who Remus was; he had said as much when he laid out the whole misbegotten affair for Harry and his friends the year before. But how much beyond those basic facts was left? It was impossible to know and Remus did not know how to ask him.

Two weeks in, after they had sat down to eat supper, Sirius stared at his bowl of soup very intently without moving to pick up his spoon. _Has he forgotten_ , Remus thought somewhat hysterically, _what soup is_? He had always imagined they fed the prisoners something like gruel in Azkaban, and then wondered whether he was getting that idea from Dickens.

“I found the box of pictures in the study,” Sirius said suddenly. “And letters. To your mum. Sorry, I should have asked.”

“That’s perfectly fine,” Remus said slowly. Sirius was still gazing intently at the soup, as though it had some hidden properties, or secrets to reveal.

“I—” he started, and then stopped. “I don’t remember very much,” he finally managed. “Almost nothing.”

“I thought that might be the case,” said Remus.

“I wish—I wish I could,” Sirius said. “I spent all year trying. And I read all those letters. You were writing about all these things that I—it’s not—it’s not there.”

“What—is there anything?” Remus said. “That you remember. Apart from everything with Peter.”

“I remembered that I did something,” Sirius said slowly. “I did something to you. Something very bad. When I got out I remembered better. In there, you have—just the feeling. The guilty feeling. It’s almost worse if you can’t remember exactly what it was you did. Because it’s not an… action. It’s just—you. I didn’t do what they said I did. So instead it was just… I had done something to you, and not believed you, and…” He trailed off, eyes unfocused. “I kept remembering being a kid again. I—” He stopped. “Anyway. It got a little better once I left. But not very much.”

“You remembered Harry,” Remus offered.

“Yes,” Sirius said, with a trace of grim humour. “I remembered feeling guilty that I hadn’t been able to protect him.”

“Well,” said Remus. “That all sounds fairly miserable.”

Sirius let out a hoarse bark of a laugh. “Yes, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t recommend Azkaban. Unpleasant place.”

“You know,” Remus said, “even when you were—ah—suspicious of me, just before it was all over—well, maybe you do remember suspecting me; I could tell, it was fairly awful. You were never as bad as James, of course, who stopped speaking to me entirely eventually, and wouldn’t let me go to their house. Anyway my point is, the last full moon before—you know—it was a couple weeks before that, and everything was very bad—we were—well, it was very bad. I was supposed to go visit the werewolves in Cornwall again but my father had just died and I just—couldn’t do it, so I came here instead, and you came with me and kept me from ripping myself to pieces in the basement. And then in the morning you patched me up and lay in bed with me all day telling me stupid stories and reading aloud from _Rebecca_ , which is actually a good novel, you know, but you didn’t take it seriously at all.” He had gone over this episode endlessly in the years that had followed. If it had all been a lie—a sham—a charade—then why—for what possible purpose—? And now he knew that in fact Sirius had loved him even though he thought he was selling them all out to Voldemort. Sirius, too, must have been thinking: is this all a lie—a sham—a charade—and why—for what possible purpose—?

Sirius was looking at him now with a terribly sad expression. He looked as though he thought Remus was in some distant country to which he could never gain access. There had to be a way, Remus thought. There had to be a way to fix it, at least part-way.

“Eat your soup,” Remus said quietly. After dinner they watched a programme on the BBC about the countryside, in which a young man talked about things like fallen birds’ eggs and dogs trespassing on property. Remus looked at Sirius sideways.

“Just think,” he murmured, “you could have been arrested,” and Sirius snorted with such disdain that Remus felt, for a brief moment, that it was 1980 once again.

•••

It was strange, Sirius had discovered, to feel things about a person without knowing why, exactly, you were feeling them. He had not entirely forgotten Remus in all the years he had spent in Azkaban, and in the two years since had had escaped fragments of things had come back to him, not so much in the form of coherent narratives but images and sensations: Remus lying on the grass in the sun, smiling; Remus’ battered body heavy against his; Remus making tea in a bathrobe, yawning, hair a mess; Remus’ fingers in his hair. For most of the first year, he had tried not to think about Remus much at all; it was too difficult. Instead he had thought obsessively about Peter, and Harry, and when thoughts of What He Had Done drifted across his mind he squashed them and returned to his planning. But when he had been hiding in the Forbidden Forest, he had once caught a glimpse of Remus on the Hogwarts grounds, and had had to turn back and run into the forest to hide himself as far away from Hogwarts as he could get, whining pitifully all the way. Sometimes he wished he really were a dog.

After that, though, when he was alone and hiding elsewhere, and some of his manic desire for revenge had been allayed, he tried to remember things. He ought to be able to; he had some intuitive knowledge that he was clever—not just clever but in fact a particularly gifted person. Things in the past, he thought, had not been so difficult as they were now. But try as he might he could only recall snatches of things: Remus’ miserable expression when he had known that Sirius had suspected him of being a spy, Sirius’ own guilt at having suspected him and his inability to stop suspecting him, and on and on and on. Sometimes thinking about this too much made him nauseous and he had to stop and become Padfoot again to make his thoughts simpler. And other times he remembered The Incident: Snape, snarling something about Lupin being a fucking queer, honestly the way he mooned over Sirius was pathetic but then Sirius had never had standards had he. Sirius thought he had said something to set Snape off, but he couldn’t remember what. And then he had told Snape he had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, he didn’t know anything about Remus, and if he wanted to find out he could go to the Whomping Willow that night and press the knot and see what happened.

He remembered that his face had gotten flushed and that something strange had happened in his stomach; later he had told them that he hadn’t meant it, but in truth he hadn’t really thought about what he was saying at all. He had been thinking, instead, about Remus, who always politely demurred when they talked about girls, who let Sirius crawl into bed with him whenever he felt like it (lonely, they were both lonely), who had a scar right at the back of his neck that Sirius sometimes gazed at during class and always kept his nails neatly clipped (unlike Sirius who chewed at his compulsively). He wanted Snape to go away, to just _go away_ , be miraculously gone, and also he wanted him to know that Remus was not just some weak queer but something fierce and fearsome. And then he had let slip to James what had happened (had he done it on purpose, some part of him knowing the disaster that would ensure otherwise?) and James had gone very pale and looked at him like he was scum under his shoe and told him that he was a fucking imbecile and had gone off and saved the day. And when Remus found out what had happened he had refused to speak to Sirius, who was left to self-flagellate and pine alone until polite but strained relations resumed.

He knew that at some point after that things had changed but he couldn’t remember when, or how. Nor did he remember any of the preceding years of innocent sublimated affection and desire, although he knew somehow that they had taken place. He felt as though he had opened a book halfway through and started reading without context. But now, as he watched Remus move around the house every day, he felt overwhelmed by the intensity of his feeling. Remus moved circumspectly, as though someone was waiting to evaluate him on his manners and hygiene, and when speaking to Sirius either chattered away politely about nonsense or asked him tactful questions with solicitous concern. Somehow Sirius knew that this was how Remus was always, not just now, in this strange and uncomfortable situation. Remus was more English than anybody Sirius had ever met, he thought; even though he couldn’t remember most of the people he had met, he was sure this was true. Everything he was feeling was folded up and hidden away somewhere. Sirius watched him and felt a profound and aching longing to collapse their bodies together. He could remember the feeling of Remus asleep against him, or awake and talking about nothing, laughing at something dumb Sirius had said. Breaking down his fortress of reserve had always been a great victory.

Sirius had been funny once. That had helped.

How could you love someone you didn’t really know, when you didn’t really know yourself? Sirius was finding out. Nothing made sense to him anymore; he had learned to simply accept things as they came. When Remus was working, or had to go out, Sirius paced around the study or the woods behind the house and puzzled over the problem of subjectivity. After a couple weeks of this he remembered the word “ontology” and felt absurdly pleased with himself. How much of himself remained from Before? What exactly constituted that “self”? How much was simply sublimated and waiting to be excavated and how much had been wholly annihilated? Was he still himself if he didn’t have his memories? Around and around he went. No answers were forthcoming.

The day of the full moon Remus did not talk much and kept looking at the clock while he edited. It was raining. He made dinner early and told Sirius he’d appreciate it if he could come fetch him in the morning, “as I’ve done some pretty bad damage recently,” he explained blandly, as though he were talking about the weather. Sirius stared.

“I’m coming down with you,” he said. This situation, he was quite certain, was absurd. He stayed with Remus on full moon nights. It was simply what he did.

Remus paused. “I didn’t exactly think—”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Sirius told him.

“It’s likely to be quite violent.”

Sirius raised his eyebrows incredulously.

Remus did all the dishes before opening up the door to the basement and holding it open for Sirius. There was a complex series of padlocks on the inside which he did up carefully before following Sirius down the stairs. Only now did Sirius notice how stiffly he was holding himself, the minute tremblings of his hands. He knew that he was supposed to talk now, to distract him, but he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t have any stories: _Let me tell you about the first month in the cave… or the third month in the cave… or the sixth… they were all pretty much the same_. So they sat against opposite walls for ten excruciating minutes until Remus stood up and said, “Sorry, I’ve got to—” and gestured vaguely at himself before turning around and starting to take his clothes off. Sirius felt his face go hot and looked away. When he looked back Remus had sat down again and had his legs pulled up in front of him. He was self-conscious, he remembered suddenly, of being naked: it was the scars. They weren’t as bad as he thought—magic could heal a lot of things—and Sirius had told him so repeatedly but it was never any use.

They waited some more.

Finally it began. Remus let out a choked noise at the start, and then tried to say Sirius’ name. But his spine was reforming itself, his bones cracking and stretching, his face contorting and breaking into something else. Sirius hated watching this but couldn’t look away. He remembered after a few horrified moments to turn into a dog, and sat with his head on the floor, watching and waiting for it to be over. When it was Remus lay there panting, spent, so Sirius trotted over to him and tried to lick his face, but Remus snapped at him and growled. He lay down again and whined. Remus snapped his jaw again but his heart didn’t seem in it; he hadn’t even gotten up yet. Remus, Sirius realised, was bone-tired. Soul-tired. He crept forward again and though Remus growled he still didn’t move. So Sirius licked his face and sniffed his neck and lay down next to him, tail thumping. Remus prodded Sirius’ own face and neck with his nose and licked him there before laying his head down again. The smell of him was almost overwhelming. Sirius closed his eyes and let their bodies rise and fall together. He was tired, too. As he was falling asleep he felt Remus’ snout settle over his.

He woke up when Remus started changing back, and pushed himself back a little. He didn’t really want to change again himself—sometimes it was very peaceful, being Padfoot—but he shook himself once and did it. Remus, when he was back to being himself, looked confused.

“What,” he started, pressing his hands to his head. “What happened?”

“We had a nice long nap,” Sirius said. “You were dead tired, Moony, I think you need to sleep more.”

Remus stared up at him. For a moment Sirius wondered whether the idea of a werewolf taking a nap was astonishing enough to warrant the expression on Remus’ face and then realised what he had called him.

“I mean it,” he said, leaning over to grab Remus’ clothes where he had left them folded very neatly under a box in the corner of the room. “Existential exhaustion, it seems to me.”

He tossed the clothes at Remus, whose hands were covering his face. His shoulders shook once, twice. Sirius imagined reaching over and pulling his hands off of his face, holding them between his own. Instead he folded his legs beneath him and held onto his ankles until his knuckles were white. Eventually Remus sat up and pulled on his shirt. He couldn’t manage the rest, so Sirius helped him up the stairs like that, dumped him onto his bed, and made toast and tea. By the time he brought them into Remus’ room, Remus was asleep. The morning sunlight, soft through the window, lit up the grey threads in his hair like silver.

*

The next week, Remus came home from a day out with a bundle under his arm and a supremely self-satisfied expression on his face. Sirius had been lying on the couch, reading a trashy romance novel from the 1950s he had found, inexplicably, in a box in the study. A woman called Pamela was working as a servant for somebody called Lord Marks, who lived in a castle and did a lot of growling and stomping up and down and liked to toss his “equine” head which had a “dark flowing mass of hair.” He couldn’t tell when exactly this book was meant to take place. They had already had sex three times.

He glanced up when Remus entered the room and watched as he began to say, smugly, “Well, I visit—" and then looked over at Sirius on the couch. He stopped speaking immediately and his face went still.

“What?” Sirius asked.

“Nothing,” Remus said. How, Sirius wondered, had he ever thought Remus was lying to him about being a Death Eater? For a werewolf, he was a terrible liar. Or maybe Sirius just knew him too well.

“What?” Sirius repeated.

“This is just”—Remus waved vaguely in his direction—“a very familiar scene. That’s all.”

“All right,” Sirius said suspiciously. “What are you doing with this, anyway? Have you opened this thing? It’s full of stuff like, ‘Pamela gazed at Lord Marks’ heaving chest as he stood over her, his dark eyes dancing in the candlelight. “My lord,” she whispered, “we must resist temptation. Think of your reputation…” “Damn my reputation!” Lord Marks cried, tossing his mane of shining dark hair.’ I mean, Christ.”

Remus stared at him for another moment and then suddenly burst out laughing. Sirius wondered if he had finally snapped. “Yes, I agree,” he said suspiciously. “Are you having a breakdown?”

“No,” Remus managed, “no, sorry, it’s just—oh, Jesus—you read that exact book when we lived in London. Lying on the sofa like that. You had about the same reaction.”

“Oh,” said Sirius, suddenly unnerved. He didn’t remember the book at all.

“It was my mother’s,” Remus said, as he put the parcel down on the kitchen table. “She mostly read old classics but had a few of those pulp romances lying around. She gave me a whole box of books for Christmas one year. You found them very intriguing. Muggle culture, et cetera.”

“Well, it’s rubbish,” Sirius said, tossing it onto the floor. He didn’t want to look at it anymore. He had actually wanted to read a real book but he had tried Dickens and made it about a page before getting a headache. He didn’t tell Remus this.

“Anyway,” Remus said. “I visited an old friend today.”

“Did you.”

“Yes,” said Remus. “Professor Martinson. He taught us Advanced Magical Theory,” he explained, “possibly your least favourite class in our Hogwarts education except Herbology, at which you were stupendously bad.”

For some reason Sirius had a strong feeling that he had not, in fact, hated Advanced Magical Theory, but he did not say this. He wasn’t sure why he thought this, and it was too confusing to explain the feeling without the memory.

“He wrote me a reference for my postgraduate degree program,” Remus continued. “I don’t think he even knew your name, or James’—god only knows how he gave out marks—but he liked me rather a lot. He was very pleased to hear from me.”

“And…?” Sirius asked.

“Well,” Remus said. He looked pleased with himself again. “I got this. Oh, I’ll just show you.” He unwrapped the parcel and tilted it to show Sirius the stone bowl inside the paper.”

Sirius stared. “Is that a Pensieve?”

“Exactly so.”

“How the fuck did you get your hands on that?”

“I just told you,” Remus said smugly. “By actually applying myself in class.”

Sirius waved a hand at him dismissively. “Where is it _from_?”

“The Oxford Institute for Magical Research and Practice,” Remus told him. “Apparently, they loan things out to independent scholars on a limited basis, upon recommendation.”

“Oh, so you’re an independent scholar now?”

“Apparently,” Remus said. “This will be an experiment, anyway.” He watched Sirius for a moment, inscrutable. “We used these in that class. You traumatised Lily by plunging her into one of your horrifying memories of childhood without warning her, as I recall.”

“Hmm,” said Sirius.

“Pensieves are subjective, just like memories are,” Remus continued. “So I can’t just—pull out memories of Hogwarts and play them like films for you to show you exactly what happened. A lot of it is sort of fuzzy and fragmented and it’s not a reliable record of events. But I thought it might be helpful.”

Sirius considered the fact that circumspect, reserved Remus Lupin was offering to crack open his mind and let Sirius inside. “All right then,” he said. Remus smiled.

Remus hung up his coat, cleared away the packaging, and put the Pensieve carefully down on the middle of the table. After a minute of staring at it, he put his wand to his temple, closed his eyes, and slowly pulled a glimmering silver light out of his head. He tipped it gently into the bowl, where it rolled around like a cloud.

“Well,” he said. “Shall we?”

Sirius shrugged.

Remus touched the memory and began to sink into it. It was such a weird process, Sirius thought. He had seen it before; it felt familiar. He leaned in and followed.

They were standing in the corridor of a train—the Hogwarts Express, Sirius assumed. At least he knew enough to know that. A little boy—he was little, Sirius thought, but not any shorter than he was; this was very strange—was walking towards them, wearing a blue jumper and grey trousers and clutching his backpack very tightly, and peering into one compartment after the next. His hair was brown and flopped down over his forehead and his face was apple-cheeked, round. Sirius felt like he was having a heart attack. The boy was chewing his lip anxiously every time he looked into the compartments, which were already rammed with students. And then he peered in the one closest to where they were standing and knocked on the door.

Sirius peered into the compartment when he slid the door open. There was the little aristocrat he had been at eleven, slumped against the window, paying no mind to the state of his black velvet robes, looking miserable. The sunlight was haloed around his black hair.

“Hallo,” Remus said cautiously. “Do you mind if I sit in here? The other compartments are full.”

Sirius looked up at him with vague disinterest. “I don’t mind,” he said. His accent was appalling.

“I never sounded like that,” Sirius said, horrified.

“You don’t sound tremendously different now,” Remus told him, “I’m sorry to tell you.”

The boys sat across from each other in silence as the train pulled out of Kings Cross.

“My name’s Remus Lupin,” Remus said eventually.

“Sirius Black,” Sirius said to the window.

“Nice to meet you,” said Remus. Sirius looked at him sideways. “Where do you live normally?”

“London,” said Sirius.

“Oh,” said Remus. “I’m from Devonshire.”

“Are you a Muggle?” Sirius asked suddenly, almost interrupting him.

Remus turned pink. “No,” he said. “My mum’s a Muggle and my dad’s a wizard.”

Sirius was looking at him intently, as though he was desperate for the answer to some unanswered question. “What house was your dad in at Hogwarts, then?”

“Ravenclaw,” said Remus. “I figure I’ll be the same. I like to read. What about you?”

“Probably Slytherin,” Sirius said despondently. “My whole family’s been in Slytherin forever.”

“You might not be,” Remus told him. “My mum always says, ‘There’s a first for everything.’”

Sirius stared at him intently again. “So do you like Quidditch, then?” he said abruptly.

“Not really. I mean, we don’t follow any team really.”

“Me neither, it’s rubbish,” Sirius said confidently. The adult version of Remus snorted.

“That was bollocks,” he said, “I think you were just trying to be agreeable.”

“I thought you said these memories were imprecise?” Sirius said. “This is an entire conversation.”

“I wrote the whole thing down in my journal that night,” Remus told him. “So I probably made some transcription errors that have lived on for posterity. Anyway, you made an impression.”

The younger version of Sirius was now asking Remus if he knew any magic. Remus shifted uncomfortably and said no. Sirius started to talk about how he knew all kinds of magic already and was particularly good at transfiguration and charms and was _bloody_ well excited to take those classes and learn proper spells and invent some of his own.

“What can you do already?” Remus asked. Sirius grinned.

“Oh, _loads_ ,” he said. “Want to see?”

“Yes,” Remus said eagerly, and then Sirius waved his hand and it started snowing. He closed his fist and a little red bird popped out, and flew over to Remus’ shoulder, where it twittered in his ear and plucked at his hair. Remus was laughing and gazing at Sirius as though he walked on water. The younger version of himself, Sirius realised, had an aura of light about him, as though he were illuminated from within.

His chest hurt. He looked at the younger version of Remus again, who was still grinning over at Sirius, and holding the bird in his hand. Snow had gathered in his hair. He didn’t know anything that was going to happen to him and had already suffered so much. Sirius could see the scars peeking out from his sleeves. He wanted to pick him up and crush him with his love and carry him away to some safer and easier time. Remus—the adult Remus, the real Remus—touched his sleeve.

“Come on,” he said quietly.

When they came up Sirius was crying. Remus tactfully turned away and started making tea, but Sirius turned into Padfoot before he could turn around again. He didn’t turn back all through the night, and instead sat on the sofa with his head on Remus’ leg, letting Remus scratch him behind the ears as he listened to the radio, and read a book by the lamplight.

*

The next day they were a little older, and Remus was in the hospital wing, his arm splinted as it healed. He had given himself a black eye. Sirius was sitting next to him, chewing his fingernails, watching as Remus’ drowsy eyes fluttered open.

“Sirius?” Remus croaked.

“Hallo,” Sirius said. “You look like you took a bludger to the face.”

Remus just made a noise.

“I took notes for you,” Sirius said.

“Thanks,” Remus managed.

“I know you’re a werewolf,” Sirius said baldly. And the memory warped, somehow—Sirius couldn’t exactly explain how—everything sort of blurred and he could almost smell fear. His younger self said something else but he couldn’t hear what it was.

“I was panicked, as you can see,” Remus told him. “I don’t remember this bit very well.”

Indeed it continued for several minutes, or what felt like several minutes. Sirius wondered if it had been a shorter time and just felt longer because it had felt that way to Remus. Memory was odd like that. The younger version of Remus was sweating and pale and staring at Sirius with an expression of sheer terror.

“Remus,” Sirius said suspiciously. “Oi, Remus. Are you listening to anything I’m saying?”

“What?” Remus said. His hands were clutched in the blankets.

“I told you that James and I worked it out,” Sirius said slowly. “We’re not _thick_ , you know. Why didn’t you say?”

Remus just stared at him.

“ _I_ don’t care,” Sirius said defiantly. “James doesn’t either.”

Remus closed his eyes. Tears started leaking out of the corners.

Sirius started saying something about Pomfrey; it wasn’t totally audible. And then he crawled up onto the bed next to Remus and kept talking, a comforting indecipherable drone, while Remus sniffed and tried surreptitiously to wipe away his tears. When Sirius looked over at Remus—now-Remus, increasingly-grey-haired Remus—he saw him turning his head away and doing the same thing.

And on they went. Some of Remus’ memories were clearer than others. There were holidays and pranks and Lily hexing James literally blue. The day they had revealed themselves to be animagi. Gryffindor winning the Quidditch cup and Sirius literally picking Remus up and throwing him over his shoulder while James got tackled in mid-air by both Gryffindor beaters and they all fell to the ground in riotous victory. All the memories were golden, warm, nostalgic. Sirius knew Remus was only showing him the good things. There was no hint of The Incident or, indeed, the full moon at all, or any of the awful mess that had led up to Lily and James’ death. Peter was barely present. And the memories, especially the memories from when they were older, were shot through with Remus’ sublimated desire and yearning, but he had shown Sirius nothing from past the point when they were—Sirius stumbled even in his own mind, thinking about it— _involved_. Remus’ English decorum, his terror of being known.

But Sirius had begun to have dreams. Some of them felt like Remus’ memories: late nights in the tower, pestering Remus just to make him laugh; hijinks with James; sitting in class with Lily and passing her inappropriate notes that she slowly passed back without reacting before stepping on his foot. He had entirely forgotten how much he had liked Lily. Now she appeared in his dreams with her hands on her hips, sceptically surveying his spellwork in Defence Against the Dark Arts and telling him he had better bloody improve if he ever wanted to protect himself from anything or anybody—Evans you wound me—collapsed on the floor next to him, clutching his hand, in some other classroom—holding Harry as an infant while he kicked his feet up on the coffee table and told her the latest dire news from the front. She had been so tough, so funny, so kind. How many people remembered Lily at all now, he wondered? So many of them had died. She had almost vanished from his memories, too. James and Lily Potter, legends now, once simply people who bickered and fed a baby and moved house too often. He fuzzily recalled James’ house, his parents, his warm stolid presence, his paranoia. He remembered Peter as he had been when he was younger, shy and insecure and desperate to be liked, remembered his own fond but somewhat distant feelings about him, remembered forgetting him when he could instead spend his time catching the attention of the bright sun that was Remus. So much of his young adulthood, he thought, had been spent trying to be the sole focus of Remus’ attention.

The worst were the dreams of his childhood. More of this had survived his time in Azkaban; after all, so much of it was awful. But even those memories had become warped and imprecise, little more than Sirius’ terror and hatred and self-loathing. Maybe that was just what happened as you got older—but he didn’t think so. In his dreams he remembered his mother more clearly: the sharp lines of her face, how much he had hated her, feared her, wanted desperately for her to say just one kind thing to him. Occasionally she had, especially when they had had company, and he had felt a physical sensation of relief all through his body, and then hated himself for it after. She had locked him away in small places and turned him upside down and mocked him and driven invisible pins and needles into his soft places and his father had buried his face in the paper and pretended nothing was happening. In his waking hours he wondered why she had been the way she had been, why she had done those things—she must, he realised now, have been so miserable, so violently unhappy. Maybe he would have spent years thinking about this and coming to some sort of equilibrium with his memories of her if things had been different. But there was no point, he told himself sternly, in thinking that way.

And he dreamed of Regulus. Regulus was dead now. He had to keep reminding himself of this: Regulus was dead, dead, dead. He had hated him by the end, too. But now he remembered him as a little boy, a tiny child, hiding in Sirius’ room, in his bed, trying and failing not to cry. Sirius had done everything he could to amuse him, distract him; he had distracted their mother and offered himself up to her for her loathing and punishment to keep her away from Regulus, who was smaller and weaker and more afraid. He did not know how aware he had been, at the time, of what he was doing—but of course it had all been on purpose. He had been so old as a little boy. And then at Hogwarts Regulus had avoided him, refused to meet his eyes; after all he was a Blood Traitor. Sorted into Gryffindor, hanging out with Mudbloods. Disgrace to the family. Their mother decided that Regulus was her perfect darling. Sirius started pushing him in the halls of their house, tripping him deliberately, pinching him under the table. Oh, it was awful to recall; he didn’t want it, didn’t want any of it. But there it was. And now Regulus was dead and he could not apologise.

He much preferred the dreams about Remus. But he slowly began to dream about watching Remus and not quite believing him. He woke up sweating, the sickening, twisting doubt still heavy like lead in his stomach. He dreamed about Remus’ body and his small private smile and the way he, Sirius, had watched him with obsessive love for most of his life and also wondered whether or not he knew him at all. When he saw the real Remus in the morning he was so disoriented he almost forgot when he was, where he was, what was happening. How closely did their memories overlap? How much of what Sirius was dreaming was really memory, and how much of it was pieced-together things from Remus’ memories and the diseased fragments of memories the Dementors had left in his own mind and his own imagination? He had begun to feel disoriented, his mind bloated, overstuffed with images and sensations and feelings. He wanted it to stop, to allow him a reprieve, and for it to continue faster and faster until he was a complete being again with knowledge of everything that had happened to him. When would it be done? he thought. When would he be himself again? But he knew that that would never happen.

*

Remus took him to the Hogwarts lawn: it was a sunny day in spring or early summer and the four of them were lying on the grass, soaking up the sun. Sirius couldn’t hear anything they were saying but he could feel the sunlight and see the lake rippling in the breeze, the trees waving lazily overhead, the bright blue of the sky. It was pleasantly hot. The two of them lay down a short distance away from their younger selves. Remus closed his eyes, and Sirius watched Remus. He had his sleeves rolled up to the elbow and hands folded behind his head and he looked young, suddenly; Sirius forgot sometimes that they were only thirty-five. Was thirty-five young? James and Lily had died at twenty-one and left a baby behind. Was that young? All the teachers he had had at Hogwarts had been older than forty, he thought. Was that old? Dumbledore was ancient. Remus looked older than he was, normally, because of the greying hair and the exhaustion and the bad joints and the fact that he had always been an old man, dispositionally. But now he looked young. Sirius wanted to touch his forearms, feel the blood running there (how real were your bodies, in a memory, in a Pensieve?), touch his face. He looked over at their younger selves. He was sitting up and taking to Remus with great animation while Remus leaned on his elbows and watched him with bald adoration. It was so sincere, so untainted—his face grew hot.

He leaned on one elbow and looked down at Remus. “Oi,” he said, “Remus.” Remus blinked up at him, squinting at the sun.

“How badly did you want to shag me, at that age?” he asked, before he could think much about what he was saying. Remus turned a violent shade of red.

“I—erm,” he said. “I don’t know that my fantasies were that advanced.”

Sirius raised his eyebrows incredulously.

“I am not getting into the details of this with you,” Remus said firmly. “I was, ah, infatuated, if that’s what you mean.”

They both turned to look at themselves for a moment. Sirius said something and spread his arms out wide and Remus laughed.

“You were very charming at that age,” Remus said. “All the girls loved you. It was awful.”

“And did I love the girls?” He really couldn’t recall. The only girl he remembered from school in any great detail was Lily, and he was quite certain he had never had amorous feelings towards her.

“You got around, if that’s what you mean.”

“Don’t remember,” he said.

“How tragic.”

He rolled onto his stomach and peered up at Remus. “I remember mooning after you mostly. _Mooning_. Hah, hah.”

Remus blushed. “Later, maybe.”

“No,” Sirius said. “I don’t think that’s right.” Something skittered like lightning across his mind, sudden and sharp. “Actually I think I told you I was as soppy for you as James was for Evans.”

“I think I’d remember that.”

“I am,” Sirius said, “ _positive_. Did you really forget my most theatrical declaration of love? That is so tragic, Moony.”

“I don’t remember it,” Remus said stubbornly, “because it didn’t happen.”

“It happened,” Sirius told him, closing his eyes, “after hours in our Advanced Magical Theory class, when you were conducting foolhardy Pensieve experiments. I followed you in secret and when you came up you looked like death warmed over.”

Remus didn’t say anything. “Well?” Sirius asked. He cracked an eye open. Remus was staring at him, frozen, stricken. “Is that wrong?”

Remus opened his mouth but couldn’t get any words out. “All right then,” Sirius said, and closed his eyes again, listening to the inchoate sounds of himself at fifteen, trying to impress Remus, while Remus laughed with delight.

*

“I don’t see why you don’t hate me,” Sirius said the next day as Remus was making dinner.

Remus turned to look over his shoulder at Sirius, who was lying on the couch. “Pardon?”

“I said,” Sirius repeated, “I don’t see why you don’t hate me.”

“That is a very odd statement,” Remus said. “Seeing as how I'm the one who believed you murdered our dearest friends for thirteen years.”

Sirius waved his hand dismissively. “There was compelling evidence,” he said. “Everybody believed that. I, on the other hand, spent months suspecting that _you_ were passing along information to Voldemort’s people for no reason whatsoever.”

Remus winced.

“Also, the whole incident with Snape,” Sirius continued, “after which, frankly, I’m surprised you ever spoke to me again.”

“That,” Remus said, stirring the rice very deliberately, “was almost twenty years ago, and frankly I’ve had bigger things to worry about since.”

“Like, for instance, the fact that we all thought you were spy for Voldemort.”

“Would you _stop_ —Sirius, that was a long time ago, it doesn’t matter.”

“We’ve not seen each other since,” Sirius pointed out, “unless you count our little encounter at Hogwarts last year, and I spent all the time in-between locked up in a cell having my memories eradicated, so in a sense it really hasn’t been that long. If you think about it.”

Remus kept stirring the rice. Sirius could tell how very, very badly he did not want to be discussing this, which for some reason only increased his own bull-headed determination to have it all out. “I’m serious—hah—Remus, you ought to want to, I don’t know, punch me in the face. I’ll offer myself up, if it would make you feel better.”

Remus turned and stared at him. “You think it would make me feel better,” he said slowly, “to punch you in the face.”

“Possibly,” said Sirius. “Though you may not have realised it yet.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Almost certainly,” Sirius told him.

“I refuse to engage with this,” Remus said. Sirius sat up on the sofa and leaned his elbows on the back.

“ _I remember_ ,” he said. “I remember how miserable you were and how awful I was. They _kidnapped you_ and scrambled your brain and we still thought you might be passing over information, I mean, what the fuck.”

Remus went very still.

“Yes,” Sirius said, grimly satisfied, “see?”

“That was a long time ago,” Remus repeated.

“Do you know,” Sirius told him, “Lily and I practised Imperiusing each other after that, to see if we could resist it? We were both hopeless. Well, we got a bit better after a while, but generally we were hopeless.”

“Lily would never have been so stupid,” Remus said. He was looking at the rice, and not at Sirius.

“I assure you,” Sirius said, “she was exactly that stupid. Besides, we were careful, and Harry was asleep. We kept saying, it _can’t_ be Remus, it _can’t_ ; neither of us could really believe it. James was a real arse about it, as I’m sure you recall. But we just couldn’t be sure. Why nobody ever suggested it might be Peter, I have no idea; I suppose he just didn’t seem like a substantial enough person. Those sorts of people are always the best spies, I'm told.”

Remus covered his face with his hands. “I don’t want to get into this,” he said.

“I think we’d better.”

“Everybody was paranoid back then,” Remus said. “I suspected everybody, too. I suspected you by the end.”

“That’s very generous,” Sirius said, “but we both know it wasn’t the same.”

“Your memories aren’t reliable,” Remus told him stiffly. “So no, we don’t.”

“Good show, Lupin,” Sirius said, “but they’re getting better by the day.”

“Oh would you just—” Remus started, almost shouting, and then stopped. His hands, clenched at his sides now, were shaking. “I do not,” he said, very carefully, “want to talk about this.”

“Moony,” Sirius said. Just watching him hurt. He had never much liked fighting with Remus; he had grown up not putting up a fight and the thought of getting into it with Remus had always terrified him. With James, it had been different: they had had screaming rows over all kinds of things, usually trivial, and then typically forgot them by the next morning. But especially after The Incident Sirius had lived in a permanent state of low-level fear of Remus deciding he was done with him. If they had ever actually said what they meant maybe their lives would not have been destroyed. “Moony, at some point in life you have to actually say what you’re thinking.”

“Would you just _fuck off_ ,” Remus shouted, and threw the pot, still full of rice, into the sink. Sirius blinked. Well, that was a start.

“Has it occurred to you,” Remus continued, “that _possibly_ I am grateful enough that you are alive and sane and not a psychopath that all of that—that _bollocks_ just doesn’t seem important anymore? I spent twelve years working in godforsaken underfunded labs in the middle of nowhere in Latvia or wherever the fuck trying to forget anything that had ever happened to me so frankly this all seems like a pretty good outcome, thanks very _fucking_ much!”

“You’re deflecting,” Sirius told him.

“Oh you fucking—” Remus was red in the face now, it was marvellous; Sirius had never seen him like this. Life was full of new things all the time. “Yes, all right, yes, I was furious with you, I couldn’t believe you thought I would do that, I couldn’t believe James thought I would do that, you were the only proper friends I ever had and all of the sudden you thought I was giving you up to people who thought I was subhuman, yes, it was fucking awful and it never made any fucking sense that they thought it was me and not you since you _knew_ all of those people and had grown up with them but I knew what they had done to you so I knew you wouldn’t do that, I _knew_ you wouldn’t, until it went on so long and you all kept thinking it was me and I thought maybe it _was_ you because why on earth else were you so suspicious? What had I ever done except go away for a few nights, of course on Dumbledore’s fucking orders, which apparently was some sort of unpardonable crime, and _yes_ of course I thought about the thing with Snape, how could I not think about the thing with Snape, you almost killed somebody and got me killed when we were sixteen so how much did you care about me or anybody really, oh my _fucking_ god I don’t want to _talk_ about any of this.” Two tears had rolled down his cheeks and a little bit of snot was dripping out of his nose.

“Moony, Moony,” Sirius said, climbing over the back of the couch. “Remus. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, you arsehole,” Remus choked out. “You don’t understand anything.”

Sirius stood hesitantly in front of him for a moment and Remus, who had barely touched him at all since he had come back, practically collapsed on top of him. “You don’t understand anything,” he said again. Sirius wrapped his arms around Remus’ back and exhaled. _Yes, I do_ , he thought, and didn't say.

*

That night he dreamt he was Padfoot, running through the Forbidden Forest with Remus. Remus was young and laughed at his canine antics. It was autumn and Remus’ cheeks were flushed with the cold, and the sun was shining brightly through the trees. Everything was monochrome and slightly warped but he could still see the bright light and Remus’ luminous face. He barked happily and snapped his teeth at Remus’ scarf before dashing off into the woods. Remus shouted something and ran after him.

When they were tired out Remus collapsed at the base of a tree, panting a little and smiling, and Sirius flopped into his lap, grinning his dog grin up at him and letting his tongue hang out. Remus scratched him behind the ears and buried his face in his fur and Sirius thought he had never been so content.

He turned over and turned back into a boy; Remus’ face was in his stomach. “Hey,” Remus said, only he was a man now, and so was Sirius. Everything was technicolour: the sky, the trees, Remus’ hair, Remus’ flushed face. He could see all the small lines around his eyes, his mouth, his forehead. He knew that he had lost his own beauty and charm and mind but Remus was gazing down at him with that old adolescent expression of love, and so he buried his hands in his hair and pulled him down to kiss him. His lips were chapped and at first even his kissing was decorous until he gave up and dug his hands into Sirius’ hair and bit his lip so hard it bled. Sirius laughed.

“You animal,” he said, laughing, and Remus blushed, and kissed him again.

At breakfast the next morning Sirius caught him looking at him strangely before blushing and looking away.

“I had a dream about you last night,” he said, and licked his spoon lasciviously.

“Oh?” said Remus, staring intently the paper.

“Did you have a dream about me?”

Remus made a noncommittal noise.

“I’ve never heard of that sort of magic,” Sirius mused. “But then the only impossible magic is necromancy.”

“Many things are possible beyond the realm of the known,” Remus told him, and turned the page.

*

The next week, they had an owl from Dumbledore informing them that the Order of the Phoenix was re-forming, and that it needed a headquarters. Did either of them have any ideas for a sensible meeting place?

“He can’t mean here,” Remus said, perplexed, “there aren’t any wards, and it’s in the middle of nowhere. I haven’t even got the fireplace connected to the Floo network. I suppose I could contact the Ministry to get it set up.”

“That isn’t what he means,” Sirius said. “He wants to use the old place. The old Black place. Grimmauld.”

Remus stared. “He wouldn’t.”

“Clearly, he would,” Sirius said, pointing at the letter. “Anyway it’s perfect: hidden, warded to hell, smack in the middle of London, free. They won’t find anything better.”

“But—” Remus said, and looked back down at the letter.

“Nothing to be done,” said Sirius, and so they went.

He had not been back to Number 12, Grimmauld Place, since he was sixteen, the day he had been disowned, excommunicated from the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black for telling his mother, while Regulus stared on with wide eyes, that he thought her pure-blood nonsense was eugenicist bollocks and that the cleverest people he knew were a Muggle and a half-blood anyway. He had never fought with her about anything and her face had gone dead white and then a furious shade of red and suddenly they were screaming at each other. In retrospect he thought she had been attempting to induct him into whatever the earliest incarnation of the Death Eaters had been. Instead she had wound up disowning him.

Even though he had been fully grown by that time he still remembered the house from the point of view of a younger child. When they opened the front door, he was surprised by how small everything was. It was not, of course, just a normal house, but compared to the memories that had been rattling around his head for over a decade it was mundane and dusty and almost squalid. The two of them stood looking at the foyer in silence for a moment before his mother’s portrait began to shriek. Remus had to pull the curtains closed, which emitted enormous clouds of dust and made both of them cough; at the sound of her hysterical voice Sirius had frozen up, his mind humming with white noise.

But it was not so bad. Someone in the Order had managed to get hold of a wand for him, and together he and Remus made their way through the house and purged it of the worst traps and curses laid for the unsuspecting and the Muggle-born; Remus himself, as a half-blood and a werewolf, had to avoid touching most things until Sirius had had a go at them. He had spent so many years buried in his memories of this place—of his parents fighting, of his mother dragging him around by his hair and cursing him into submission while Regulus watched on and cried, of his own stiff, miserable obedience—that walking around the real, physical corridors and rooms was both disorienting and strangely anti-climactic. There was nothing here except the ghosts of the people who had tormented him; they had left behind shadows of their cruelties in the form of curses and enchantments that he could, easily in some cases and with more difficulty in others, disperse with a wave of his wand. Some of them, of course, were impossible to fix; those rooms were sealed off until somebody else could sort them out.

He avoided going in his old room for a week. When he did finally open the door he found it utterly unchanged apart from the thick accumulation of dust. His Quidditch posters were still on the wall, his books on the shelves, his desk drawers full of letters from James and Peter and Remus. So many letters from Remus. _Dear Sirius, It is only three weeks into the summer and I am already so dreadfully bored I have already done all of my summer reading. Do not make fun of me, I know you are laughing as you read this! But there is nothing at all to do in Devonshire; I have been reduced to weeding the garden and surveilling nefarious rabbits that might come chew at nascent lettuces. Dear Sirius, I refuse to believe that you, ignoramus of all things Muggle though you might be, have somehow entirely escaped the phenomenon that is_ Jaws _. Every single person in the village has seen it and now has strong feelings about shark safety protocols even though we do not live near the ocean. Dear Sirius, Moon bad last night. Can’t write much as I am very tired. Wish you were here. Moony xx_

His old photos were still tacked up to the wall above his desk. He remembered, now, how angry he had been at losing them. There they all were: James and Peter and Remus and Sirius. Laughing and mugging for the camera. James in his Quidditch robes, striking a pose. Remus reading in the library, apparently unaware that his photo was being taken at all. And Remus and Sirius by the lake, Sirius with his arm slung around Remus’ neck, making some stupid joke to make Remus laugh while Remus glanced adoringly at him, young and innocent and secretly—even to each other, even to themselves—in love.

The others would begin to arrive the next day. Everything would begin again: war, secrets, sacrifice. People would suspect each other and regret it later; people would die. Nothing ever changed, he thought. Or maybe he was just living in the worst possible time, cursed by an unlucky star. That night, as they sat at the kitchen table and ate dinner, Sirius watched Remus and thought about time: how it passed no matter how badly you wished it wouldn’t, no matter what happened to you in the interval, no matter how unfair your life had been. And he thought about memory—his own fractured, unreliable, incomplete memory, which was all he had to measure the span of the years. It would have to do, he supposed. A feeling was a feeling was a feeling.

“Remus,” he asked, “do you remember writing me a letter about _Jaws_?”

“What?” Remus said. “ _Jaws_? No.”

“Well, you did,” said Sirius. “I have no idea what _Jaws_ is, but you sent me a letter about it, over Christmas vac at the beginning of 1976.”

“ _Jaws_ is a film,” Remus said. “A film about a shark eating people off the coast of some little beach town in America. It was quite the sensation at the time. I went with my parents, my dad thought it was the stupidest thing he’d ever seen and my mum and I screamed the whole time.”

Sirius smiled. “That’s nice, Moony,” he said. Remus looked at him oddly.

After dinner they sat and read in the parlour, which they had enchanted to look slightly less terrifying, or rather Remus read while Sirius pretended to read and instead watched him from the other end of the sofa. He imagined leaning forward to kiss Remus, in real life this time: he would take the book out of his hands, toss it on the ground, and take his face in both of his hands. One day soon he would do it. For now he pushed his feet under Remus’ thigh, and watched Remus smile slightly to himself and turn the page in his book before reaching down to rest his hand on Sirius’ ankle. Sirius could still feel it later, when he was getting in bed to sleep: a ghost touch, almost as real as the real thing.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Twitter [here](http://www.twitter.com/mldavies).


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